


The Tide Comes Rushing In

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bucky Barnes & Steve Rogers Friendship, Dubious Science, Getting Together, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark Friendship, M/M, MIT!Rhodey, MerMay, MerMay 2018, Mermaids, Obsessive Behavior, POV Tony Stark, Protective Steve Rogers, Runaway Tony Stark, Sliding in on the last day of mermay, Sort of? - Freeform, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Teenage Tony Stark, Tentacle Mermaids, Tentacles, Unhealthy Behavior, WinterIron Spring Fling, graphic crab eating, mostly about Howard
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2019-05-15 09:04:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 42,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14787539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Tony has run away from home, and is living out of a backpack in California when he accidentally stumbles across a merman with his name written on its arm.





	1. California Two-Spot Octopus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [endof_theline](https://archiveofourown.org/users/endof_theline/gifts).



> My WinterIron Spring Fling gift for endof_theline, combining two of their short prompts: Mermaid AU and Soulmates.

Tony decided he liked California. The sun made his skin feel like it was glowing, which it probably was, come to think of it. He should be on the lookout for sunscreen. It was so bright out he could wear his sunglasses everywhere, and the water was cool enough on the soles of his feet to sooth the irritation from the sand. 

He should probably be focused on finding a place to pitch the little tent strapped to the bottom of his enormous backpack, but it didn’t feel quite as urgent here on the warm beach. He heard some of the older teens he’d passed earlier talking about a bonfire- if he could make one of those, he’d be set. He’d seen some campsites a few miles back, a couple of meters past the high tide line, so he probably wouldn’t get in trouble for pitching a tent near there. 

It felt nice, just being out here. It wasn’t that he was happy to be by himself; on the contrary, he missed Jarvis and his wife Ana, and the loneliness was swirling threateningly somewhere deep in the unregulated, rebellious sections of his brain, but it was drowned out by the relief that shuddered down his spine like a pleasant touch whenever he remembered that he wouldn’t have to look at Howard ever again. All he’d have to do was stay out of sight for what, three years? Then he’d be an adult, and Howard wouldn’t be able to do anything.  _ You might be able to force a child to live under your roof, but you can’t force an adult to do shit _ , he thought vindictively. In fact, once he got himself set up out here, he might even start cultivating an adult online presence. A scientist, perhaps, but who could he claim to be affiliated with? 

Oh well. That was a question for later.

Further on up the beach he spotted a bunch of rough, barnacle-encrusted rocks stretching out into the ocean. Uprooted kelp lay limp across them like the hair of a sleeping sea goddess. As he drew close, he saw little crabs scurrying around the water line. A white sand dollar tapped against the nearest rock in time with the waves. An urchin the color of his Mom’s second-favorite amethyst ring sat almost motionless on top of a section of kelp that trailed down into the sand. Multi-colored starfish littered the outer rocks, and he felt the urge to go see how hard it would be to detach one. 

His inner scientist started clapping its hands in delight. This had to be special- there was so much marine life on just this one pile of rocks! That couldn’t be normal; this had to be some sort of special place. Other beaches didn’t have such rich ecosystems just laying out in plain view, right?

Tony was hit with the sudden thought that he’d never really been to a beach before. Howard had thought beach play was a waste of time. 

He was still riding the powerful wave of triumphant post-runaway fuck-you-Dad that had started welling up in his chest when he shut the back door behind him a few nights ago, so no sooner did he have the thought than he decided to spend the entire day at the beach. Even if it proved dreadfully boring, even if he got sunburned, even if he had to pitch his tent in the woods by the beach and wake up to sand in his sleeping bag because the wind had blown the wrong direction that night, he would not leave this beach for the next twenty-four hours. 

The first thing he was going to do was indulge his own curiosity in that rock full of creatures. He was going to take the notebook out of his backpack, study whatever he wanted to study first, write in whatever alphabet he wanted, and no one could say zip about it.

Rebellion felt so good.

He found a dry spot on top of one of the rocks where a natural cradle formed and set his heavy backpack down in it. After a little positioning, he was reasonably sure that the various items dangling off the back and bottom wouldn’t dangle into the ocean. It was perfectly positioned to let him keep an eye on it while he explored the rocks a little more.

There were so many little creatures stuck to the rocks. Many of them he recognized from the basic biology courses he’d had back at boarding school, but many he did not. He’d have to look them up later. For now, he drew little pictures of them in his notebook and wrote his observations on the sides.

There were flimsy green plant-like things that seemed to grow out of the rock. Were they sea plants? Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure if seaweed was a plant. It didn’t have any soil to grow in, and wasn’t salt supposed to be bad for plants? He jotted down each question and stubbornly kept himself from pulling out his phone and trying to look it up. He could do that tonight, when it was dark out and he’d need his phone to see in the dark anyway. 

Slowly, he waded further and further out along the rocks. The slope of the beach was so shallow it was practically flat, so it was hard to notice how far out he’d waded. Only his paranoid glances at his backpack kept him from wandering out recklessly far.

After the first hour of studying the rocks, he spotted a shadow out of the corner of his eye. He immediately fell over himself scrambling backwards. His pants got wet and his butt was covered in sand, but that wasn't nearly as important as getting out of the water as fast as possible. 

When he managed to find his footing again, the shadow was gone.

Cautiously, he scanned the water, but the only shadows were his own and those cast by the rocks. Could whatever it was have been frightened off by his panicked splashing? Could it have swum away fast enough to be completely out of sight in just a few seconds? He’d only seriously studied the hard sciences, not the squishy ones like marine biology. For all he knew, terrifying sharks habitually prowled shallow waters with rocky, uneven ground and lots of aquatic plants. 

He’d dropped his pencil and notebook in the water. Once he was convinced the shadow wasn’t going to reappear the second he took his eyes off the water, he retrieved it and surveyed the damage. The pages were all soaked through, and most of his pencil drawings were already destroyed. Just turning the pages ripped some of them. Maybe if he had a hair dryer and a flat surface he could save it, but as it was many of the pages were already starting to stick together. It was a lost cause. He tried and failed not to imagine his father calling him a lost cause, and chucked the notebook at his backpack.

So he’d had a setback. Dropping a notebook in the water didn’t mean that Howard was right about anything. This was what his excellent memory was for. It wasn’t like his drawings had been any good for identification anyway.

Whatever that shadow had been, it didn't reappear, no matter how many sweeps his eyes made over the water, so he slowly waded back out to get a better look at a starfish with 14 arms. How was it sticking to the rock like that? Were the bottoms of the legs sticky, maybe? He reached out and gave one of the legs a light tug. It came free easily, but he felt the rest of the animal clamp down on the rock. That was okay; he only wanted to see the bottom of the one leg. He leaned his head to the side, almost parallel with the water, to get a good sight angle on it.

The underside of the arm was covered in little tan tubes smaller than a broken end of uncooked spaghetti that moved slowly. Huh. He hadn't known starfish could move. 

He carefully sticks the leg back to the wall. He’s not sure if that’s what you’re supposed to do, but the starfish doesn’t go tumbling, so he figures it’s good enough. 

Eventually, he was pretty sure he’d observed each and every organism around the rocks. He slipped the ruined notebook back into his backpack and sat on a relatively clear spot.

The skin on his legs slowly became bumpy from the cold and his neck started sweating, so he stayed in the water even after cataloging each and every creature on and around the rocks. The heat was nice at first, but now it was getting oppressive. He thought about sinking all the way into the water, but then his clothes would all be wet, as opposed to just his pants. 

Besides, he feels strangely reluctant to move. Like if he moved now, he would be picking a direction to go. Like he’d be making a decision. Which shouldn’t be a problem; he’s never been indecisive before. But just now, standing in the hot sun next to the backpack that contained all of his belongings and a ruined notebook full of childish drawings, he suddenly wasn’t sure his latest decisions had been any good. Running away?  _ Really? _ That was what whiny, ungrateful children did, not Starks. 

His legs trembled, but didn’t bend. Should he just go back? Howard would be pissed that he ran away, there was no getting around that, but it would probably blow over. He’d find something else to be mad about. Tony could wait a little bit longer, become an adult and move out. He tried to let that scenario run out in his mind, but his stomach kept tying itself up and distracting him. Howard was just so awful when he was angry. He didn’t want to picture it. It was stupid, but it felt like if he pictured him he’d somehow summon him. Like if he thought about him, he’d be there, infecting Tony’s thoughts and impossible to get rid of.

Just outside his field of vision, something big moved in the water.

The spell of indecision broke and Tony threw himself backwards. His arms flailed and splashed wildly and he just about flipped over backwards, but he was out of the water in under ten seconds, so he counted it as a win. Unfortunately, he wasn’t looking where he was going in his mad dash to escape whatever-it-was in the water, so he didn’t notice the person on the beach behind him until he plowed right into them.

“Jesus, man, what was that about? I’m gonna be sandy all day now. Just you wait, I’ll shower and change clothes and everything and I’ll still feel sand rubbing me raw somewhere.”

Tony blinked at the man he’d run into, then zeroed in on the MIT t-shirt he was wearing. 

“There was something big in the water.” It sounded stupid now that he’d plowed over this innocent stranger. The flailing and wild splashing also seemed a little over the top. He felt the adrenaline begin to leach from his system, and embarrassment hurried to replace it. 

“Aw man, you had the right idea. It’s because of shit like that that you can’t trust the ocean. Only fools aren’t scared of those crazy-looking fish with the knife-teeth and weird eyes and stuff out near the bottom of the ocean, but you think you’re safe in the shallows. Then boom, there’s a four foot tall shark in three feet of water, and you’re too busy freaking out about how it even got there to get out of the way.”

Tony’s eyes snapped back to the man’s face. He was looking distrustfully over Tony’s shoulder at the surf.

“Sorry for bowling you over.”

The man brushed his apology aside. 

“Nah, I’m glad you did. Now I know to stay out of the water. I’ll warn the other guys about it, too.”

“Others?”

“I’m here on a research internship with some other MIT students. We’re experimenting with some drone stuff, and we were going to test some of them on the beach, but we might have to change that plan. They might crash into the water, and I am not going in there to get them back.”

Tony perked up.

“What kind of drones?”

* * *

Three hours later, Rhodey from MIT was Tony's new best friend and partner in crime. Well, technically his name was James Rhodes, but that sounded too straightlaced and uptight for a partner in crime, so Rhodey it was.  


Rhodey had taken him to the MIT field lab, which was just as absolutely fantastic as Tony had imagined. It was in a nice area with lots of sun, and there were big windows letting in as much natural light as possible. Light-sensitive labs were in the interior of the building, away from the light, so it got progressively darker as you got closer to the center of the field lab. There were cute little rooms set up for two or three students each, most of which were abandoned right now. Rhodey said almost everyone else was already eating dinner outside to make the most of the heat. Rhodey didn’t want to join them because evening on a hot summer day meant mosquitoes and ants that blended right into the low light and crickets and all kinds of other bugs, and he was not a bug person. That was fine by Tony. Free food was always welcome now that he was on the run.

Enough spare parts to build an entirely new drone were fanned out around them in neat rows, organized by size. When Rhodey had showed him that he had enough spare pieces to build a whole new drone, Tony had just dumped them all out in a pile lego-style and started working, only to be interrupted by his new friend’s horrified and offended gasp.

“What the fuck, man? How do you expect to work with any of that when it’s all in heaped together like that? Didn’t anybody ever teach you basic etiquette? What if you need a piece and it’s buried in the middle?”

Tony shrugged. “Then I’ll go digging for it.”

Rhodey just shook his head and started organizing. Tony had to admit, it did make it easier to find the parts he wanted, though now he had to reach in multiple directions for what he wanted rather than in one. He made sure to complain about it as loudly and ridiculously as possible. 

“Oh no, look at that, I have to reach backwards to get the pin then to the left to get the wire, what kind of system is this? I only have so many arms, you know!”

“You’re fine, quit your whining. Man, you must be a little terror in the lab.”

“Excuse you, I am a genius, I’m always a delight to have in the lab!”

Well, technically, considering the only labs he’d ever really been in were his boarding school’s or his father’s, usually when his father wasn’t around, this was sort of the truth. But if he’d ever had the chance to be in another lab like the ones Rhodey must hang out in at MIT, he was sure he’d be a joy to work with, if only because he could impress everyone with his results. Without his father around to point out all the ways he’d done wrong, had always done wrong, and would probably do wrong in the future, he was positive he could dazzle his any lab partner college could throw at him. So long as they stayed in the lab, of course. His personal life had always been kind of a swirling void of chaos and disaster.

It wasn’t that he was lying to his new friend, he told himself, though he was definitely  _ misleading  _ him more and more as their acquaintance went on. He was just sparing him from the circus of horrors that was Stark family drama. 

Instead, he kept up a running dialogue about what to add to which parts of the building process to make the thing waterproof. At one point his Rhodey placed one big hand over his smaller, hummingbird-fluttering hands to still them and told him that he didn’t have to go looking for household liquids with the chemicals he wanted in them, that was insane, the lab had those chemicals in discrete packets. Tony fell in love with the field lab all over again.

Once they’d made it waterproof, they set to work figuring out how to get it to go in and out of the water. It had to be able to move through the water, but without sacrificing its ability to fly. And it was too heavy to try and design to be like one of those diving sea birds, but they wrote that idea down anyway in case it ended up being useful later. Eventually Tony hit on the idea of modifying the joints in the helicopter part of the drone, and it was smooth sailing from there on out.

“How do you think of these things, man?” Rhodey asked as Tony screwed another casing into place. 

“It just sort of comes to me, you know?” 

He bit back the  _ child genius, comes with the territory _ that he normally added on. No need to make himself sound like somebody his new friend might have heard of before. 

With the help of MIT’s fancy equipment, they completed the new drone just as the stars were starting to come out. The night was swiftly growing darker as California’s spot on the globe spun further and further away from the sun, and a cool breeze fluttered their shirts as they made the walk from the mobile lab back to the beach. They each grabbed a flashlight with the MIT logo on it and set out. 

The grass along the path was that long, dry blonde grass that fooled you into thinking it was just like the green grass that you could walk across just fine, when in reality it was nature’s slip-’n-slide. Tony tried to be careful, but about halfway there his shoe slid out from under him. He dug his hands into the drone like claws and prepared for the sensation of free falling that always accompanied his failures, especially when other people were involved, but Rhodey managed to catch him at the last minute.

“Gotcha. Yeah, I hate that grass. It looks so innocent, but it’s caused so many accidents since we all got here. Kevin slipped on it within twenty seconds of getting here. You okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

Somewhere in the back of his head he felt that it shouldn’t be fine. He’d almost dropped something important. In the heartbeat before Rhodey had caught him, he could have sworn he’d heard Howard’s shouting in his ear. 

But that was over now. He’d run away and put the whole country between Howard and himself. 

His backpack weighed heavily on his shoulders. He was positive the straps would leave big read marks that would never go away. That was silly though. Human skin can recover just fine from a lot worse than a heavy backpack.

* * *

The beach announced itself to them in the dark by the sand that infiltrated the grassy path even above the tide line. The wind blew against them softly and pelted the fine grains at their exposed shins. Tony considered getting his coat out of his backpack, but it wasn’t quite cold enough for that.  


They swung their flashlights around searching for a big, sturdy log around the tide line to sit on, preferably one that was flatter on top. Once they’d acquired their seat, Tony turned on the camera and handed Rhodey the remote. 

It occured to Tony that this was the first thing he’d built since leaving home. 

The drone whirred to life and rose wobbling and slightly unsteady, into the air. Theoretically, it should be able to plunge in and out of the sea without issue. Watching how it rocked a bit with the air currents didn’t inspire quite as much confidence as he’d like, but it was what it was. The only thing to do what give it a whirl. 

With Rhodey piloting, the drone flew out over the shallow waters just beyond the rocks Tony had been examining earlier. It hung in the air, wobbled uncertainly, then fell beneath the water with a splash. A few seconds later, it reemerged. 

Tony felt a lightness ignite in his chest.  _ It worked! _ He turned to Rhodey, who was bouncing excitedly in place, and giggled. Rhodey answered him with a deeper laugh and another button push to send the drone plunging back into the water.

“How deep do you think it could go? Cause if we could send something like this deeper than a foot or two, that would really be something.”

Tony considered it. “Well, I don’t really want to test it out at night with no way of getting it back, but this could probably go maybe ten feet down? We didn’t really put in anything to deal with the pressure, or the way light filters through water. If we went too deep without some sort of light, it would just send us a bunch of pictures of black void. Buuuuuut, if you’re willing to let me keep hanging around your lab, I’d be happy to help you build something a little better for deep sea diving.”

Rhodey patted his shoulder. “You’ve got a deal. Now let’s haul this thing back to the lab. I want to get some shut-eye before tomorrow.”

Tony felt like a toasted marshmallow right about then - soft, warm, and sticky sweet. It was probably a bad idea to imprint this hard on the first person he’d talked to since running away from home, but he was on a roll with the bad ideas here and nothing too terrible had happened. 

Rhodey’s arm stayed wrapped around his shoulder as they flew the drone in and out of the water, and Tony made no move to push him off. He mentally scratched out his plans to head further north tomorrow and started strategizing how he’d live here for a bit without anyone realizing he was homeless. 

* * *

Later, when they had returned to the lab and Rhodey had mumbled his good nights and headed to bed without making sure Tony left, he looked at the footage. Just to check and make sure that the camera had worked underwater. It would be bad form to declare their little project a success until he knew for sure it hadn’t failed.  


His mind wasn’t on product testing or quality control as he shook his finger over the mouse pad on the laptop Rhodey had used earlier when they were putting the modified drone together. He was thinking about Rhodey’s laugh, his easy acceptance of Tony’s ideas, how easy it was to exist in the same space as him. He knew it was silly to put so much weight on such a new, untested friendship. He’d never really had the chance to make a friend before, and science was the only thing that had ever come to him without mistakes. 

It wasn’t like they really knew anything about each other. Rhodey didn’t know his last name, or that he was a run away, or that he was sleeping in a tent near the beach tonight. He didn’t know about Howard, or how bad Tony was at holding onto anything good. And for his part, he didn’t know anything about Rhodey besides his college, his interest in engineering, and the way he made Tony feel safe. He didn’t even know how long Rhodey was here for; he might be on a plane for the East Coast again in a week’s time. 

But it was good, damn it, and little though he might deserve it, failure as a son and as an heir that he’d been so far, he was going to give friendship a whirl. Worst case scenario, he got his heart ripped up some more, and besides, who needed a heart? Stupid things just made it harder to do what you had to do. 

The drone beeped as it began sending the pictures to the computer. A file appeared on the desktop with a partially-filled progress bar underneath. Tony patted the drone the way Rhodey had patted his shoulder out on the beach, just to try out to motion. It felt good. The drone beeped some more, and to Tony’s ears it sounded content. 

“You deserve that, little guy. Tonight was a job well done,” he whispers to it. 

When at last the pictures stop downloading, he opens the file on a whim. It was dark out, and they’d set the camera to take a picture once every twenty seconds then promptly forgotten to time the machine’s dives, so the pictures probably weren’t that good, but some of them might be salvageable. He clicked lightning-fast through poorly-lit shot after poorly-lit shot of kelp and rocks and the occasional darting fish. 

Then he reached picture #153 and felt over on his ass.

There was a partial human body in the water, naked from the waist up. Both legs and one arm were completely missing.

Tony’s heart kicked into high gear and he felt the familiar fuzzy-headedness that came with an adrenaline rush. His hands were shaking as he pushed himself to his feet. He needed to report this. A person had died out there, and he and Rhodey had unknowingly filmed the body. Oh shit, there were going to be police everywhere and an investigation and someone was going to put it together that Tony was Tony Stark and send him home kicking and screaming, and oh god there might be a killer out there somewhere who was dumping their victims in the ocean and Tony was going to be sleeping alone in a tent on the beach tonight -- wait a minute.

He paused, then looked at the picture again. 

The torso didn’t look severed. The pale skin made it stand out against the rock, and he couldn’t see any matching legs, but the skin flowed smoothly into the rock rather than ending in some gory mess. Cautiously, he clicked to the next picture.

The next picture was a blurry shot of open water, and the next one was of a bunch of kelp, but the one after that showed the torso again, this time facing the camera. It was a well-muscled man with shoulder length hair and just one arm. His eyes were open and looking curiously at the camera. Still no sign of legs. 

The next picture showed the man in open water, and oh wow, he did have legs. Eight of them, in fact. Though Tony had never before seen a person with octopus tentacles instead of feet, but you know, better weird feet than no feet. 

Possibly more disturbing than that, however, was the lettering on the man’s arm. On the inside of his forearm, pointed right at the camera, was  _ TONY STARK _ in bold block letters. 

The next picture revealed a blurry close up of his face. The beginning of his name was still very visible on the creature’s one human arm where the camera caught it’s shoulder. The drone caught it mid-blink, and it’s long hair was drifting across the lense, but it’s open mouth full of teeth came across loud and clear. Tony was reminded of the time he went to the natural history museum with Jarvis - it was so long ago he couldn’t remember which one it had been. What he did remember was the well-lit display of prehistoric shark teeth, arranged in a sort of fan formation so that their sharp tips faced away from the viewer. 

Fast on the heels of that came the memory of the large  _ something _ in the water earlier that day. 

Part of Tony wanted to run screaming for Rhodey and show him this immediately. Since he didn’t know Rhodey that well yet, that was probably a bad idea. Also, he might wake up other people too and then he wouldn’t be able to slip away quietly when international media descended on the first mermaid caught on camera. 

Another part of him wanted to go do some impromptu skinny dipping for science and track down that mermaid himself. He couldn’t think of a single good reason why that octopus mermaid thing had his name written on it’s arm, which meant there was probably a bad reason. However, considering the wicked sharp teeth in some of these pictures and the fact that he had no idea what a mermaid ate, that was also probably a bad idea. Maybe there was something to some of those old stories about mermaids who ate sailors after all. 

A third part of him wanted to go pitch his tent in the woods and deal with this nonsense tomorrow. That seemed to be his best plan so far. It had the fewest downsides, anyway. Mind made up, he shut the laptop and powered down the drone, then exited the lab and headed back towards the patch of forest he’d surveyed earlier. 

He resolutely didn’t think about the creature in the pictures as he walked alone in the dark along the beach. 

He definitely didn’t picture those sharp teeth as he pitched his tent by flashlight.

And those eight octopus arms that blended in so well with the stone were the farthest things from his mind as he laid down to sleep.

When he woke up the next morning he didn’t even remember his dreams. 

* * *

The next morning Tony woke up in desperate need of coffee. He rolled over on his side, eyes still crusted half-shut with sleep, and considered pulling his special container of coffee out of his pack.  


He almost decided to make some. It was the kind of coffee that Jarvis had introduced him to way back when, and it still smelled like comfort to him. He’d sacrificed enough space in his backpack for a whole outfit to take some of it with him. He knew he’d have to ration it, and that it was way too soon to be dipping into his stores, but at the same time he desperately wanted a little comfort. It was chilly out this morning, and a little dew had snuck its way into the tent. His back felt funny from sleeping on a sleeping bag pad instead of a mattress, and his whole spine felt weirdly stiff. His toes were cold, but his neck was uncomfortably hot. 

However, he didn’t have anything to heat the water for homemade coffee, and if he was going to get up to make a fire he might as well get up and head to town for cheap cafe coffee. That way he could probably get a free internet connection. 

Groaning, he unzipped his sleeping bag enough to let in the cold air and began the laborious process of pulling on the clothes he’d laid out the night before without actually getting out of his sleeping bag. Once he could no longer put it off, he reluctantly slid out of his cozy nest and pulled on his shoes and a hoodie. Finally dressed to face the world, he started taking down the tent and packing everything back up into his backpack.

He really needed to figure out how to make some money soon, if only so that he could afford a coffee pot. This whole process might be more bearable if he knew that once he had a fire started, he could snuggle back into his warm sleeping bag, provided he stayed close enough to the fire to tend it.

What were the chances that someone around here would hire a homeless fifteen year old runaway with no legal identification because Howard still had his passport and birth certificate and he didn’t know how to drive? 

Maybe Rhodey would have some ideas. Maybe - shit,  _ Rhodey _ . The  _ mermaid _ . 

He abruptly felt wide awake and ready to panic. He and Rhodey had discovered a mermaid, and only he knew. Would Rhodey have looked through the pictures yet? He couldn’t be sure. The pictures weren’t supposed to be interesting, they were supposed to be proof that the camera worked both above and below water. It wasn’t like Rhodey would be leaping out of bed to go examine the footage. 

Should he call Rhodey? Text him? Wait for him to stumble across it himself? Hide the evidence? No, Rhodey was his friend and lab provider, lying to him was a bad idea. 

He took a deep breath and shoved his panic aside. First, he would get coffee and get an internet connection. He’d check to see where the police were looking for him, check his email, maybe google ‘jobs for homeless teens’ or something, then he’d go to the beach and see if he could find that mermaid again, without alerting the mermaid itself. He’d work it out from there. 

* * *

The coffee shop was loud, crowded, and claustrophobic, but a large cup of black wonderfulness was dirt cheap compared to New York prices and the internet password was written in blue chalk on bottom of the menu board, so Tony marked it down as an unqualified success. Or at least he did, right up until his saw his own face looking back at him from a wanted poster on the cafe cork board.  


His heartbeat kicked into high gear, and he felt the sudden urge to hide somewhere dark and warm where he could stay forever and no one would be able to find him. But getting up and bolting out of the blue would draw all kinds of attention, so he just hunched over a little more and adjusted his hoodie again so that it covered most of his face. It would be okay. People didn’t even look at those posters. After a long, bracing sip of coffee, he opened his phone’s browser and got to work.

First he googled himself. Sure enough, Howard was offering obscene amounts of money for his return while his mother cried photogenic tears into every camera lens she could find. He’d predicted that much; Howard might not like him, but he was invested in Tony at this point, in resources if nothing else. Besides, it would do terrible things to his reputation for his heir to run away, and even worse things if said heir blabbed the wrong things to the press. There was speculation galore about why he’d run, of course, ranging from the outlandish to the truth. 

But what about the actual investigation? He scrolled past story after story about what his mom said, what his dad said, what some rando child psychologist said, what somebody from the company said, what his boarding school math teacher said, until finally he hit something bare-bones enough to have some facts.

Some of the tension in his shoulders eased. Looks like they still thought he booked it for Canada. Canada, with lots of wide open spaces, far-flung little towns, huge swathes of ‘remote’ northern territory, and lots of short, brown-eyed brown-haired fifteen-year-olds last seen in nondescript hoodies. Hopefully that false lead would last long enough for Tony to get himself set up.

Next he searched for some free college-level marine courses and saved them to look at later. The little notebook he’d started yesterday had been fun, but not much of a field notebook. With a little more domain knowledge, though, he could make it’s eventual replacement into one.

Lastly, he searched mermaid sightings. His search turned up a lot of obvious hoaxes, a couple of urban legends, some creative writing, a couple of YA books on mermaids someone had recommended on Goodreads, the webpage of a professional diver/mermaid, an art blog on Tumblr, and an animal planet documentary. Refining his search yielded more urban legends, a different recommended Goodreads book, and some quality conspiracy theories. He saved a couple of those at least in part for their entertainment value, finished his now lukewarm coffee, and discretely left the cafe. 

* * *

It was still early morning, so there weren’t many people out on the beach when he got there. He still felt a jolt of unease for each new person he saw, but no one looked twice at him, so he was probably alright.  


The water was chilly when he stepped in. Goosebumps shivered up his legs and down his arms. He walked carefully over the loose pebbles and shell-filled sand that made up the bottom of the ocean, praying to the benevolent ghosts of every scientist he could think of that he didn’t step on a barnacle or an oyster and start bleeding everywhere. 

This was a bad idea. This was a really bad idea. He was going to do it anyway.

Out past the rock he’d been studying yesterday was another enormous rock that stuck out of the water like a giant thumbs up. The drone had flown around it a lot last night, so it was probably a good place to start looking for his elusive mermaid. 

The chilly water rose past his knees, then slowly up his thighs and over his hips, over his belly button, and finally to his mid torso before he reached the rock. The water got chillier as he went, as only the top layer had been warmed a little by the sun. He had to hold his backpack over his head, and was grateful both that he wouldn’t have to swim and that years of handling heavy, unwieldy equipment in the lab had left him strong enough to lift all of his stuff for long enough to circle the rock. 

The other side of the rock was broken a bit, and there was a section of rock that sloped gently into the water. He clamored onto it and sat down. It was a relief to set the heavy pack down, though he made an extra effort to place it well away from the water, just in case.

Now, if he could just figure out how exactly he was going to find a mermaid with big pointy shark teeth, he’d be golden. He’d probably have to swim. It wasn’t like this mysterious mermaid with his name on it was going to be hanging around on dry land. On the other hand, he wasn’t all that eager to get in the water.

What was he even doing? This thing was probably dangerous, and coming out here by himself was stupid. He should have waited, talked to Rhodey, shown him the pictures. With teeth like this thing had, it probably didn’t eat algae or krill. He wasn’t the strongest swimmer either. 

What was he even doing in California? Yeah, home was awful, but what if he’d just sucked it up for a few more years? What made him think he could do this, just leave and set himself up and - 

Something wet and soft touched his knee. 

His thoughts froze, and he went stone still beneath the tentacle resting on his leg. His eyes fell on the face peering up at him from the water with a wide, broken bottle smile and  _ TONY STARK _ standing out on a single pale human arm. The arm is waving at him.

“Hello,” the creature says. The words are shaped strangely by a tongue that has to twist to avoid sharp teeth. Tony wants to run, but there’s nowhere to run to on this rock. 

“My name is Bucky.” Bucky smiles wide and charming, putting his teeth on perfect display. Tony would like to focus on how in Tesla’s name the octopus-mermaid-thing could speak English, but he was still hung up on the teeth. His vision seemed to be forming a tunnel around them. He felt faint. 

Bucky lifts his one human arm higher out of the water and angles the lettering on the side towards Tony. 

“Are you Tony Stark?”

Tony slowly backed up the rock. The tentacle slipped off his leg and hit the rock with a sound like a seal slapping its own side. Bucky’s smile faded a bit, and Tony paused just outside tentacle-reach to reassure the creature enough to keep it from following him. To keep him from following him? The mermaid thing’s upper body looked male, but that might not mean anything.

“I’m not going, I’m just putting a little distance between my body and your big, sharp teeth. You aren’t related to any prehistoric sharks, by any chance, are you?”

Bucky frowned, and ran one of his fingers over his teeth. He seemed to be considering them for the first time. Perhaps the extra toothy smile wasn’t supposed to be an  _ I’m a big, scary predator _ smile?

“Okay, Tony Stark. I’ll keep my tentacles to myself.”

“Just Tony’s fine, actually.” He eyed the tentacle that had been on his knee as it retreated back into the water. It curved like an eel as it slid lazily down the rock. 

“So, wanna tell me why my name is written on you arm?”

Bucky’s smile dimmed, and his lazily undulating tentacles became still as sculpture. 

“What do you mean, why? I’m your soulmate! Of course I have your name.”

Tony started backing up again. That was not a good answer.

“What do you mean, soulmate? Like that storytelling trope they like to trot out when they want to convince the audience that  _ these characters’ _ love is somehow better than everyone else’s love?”

He knew even as he said it that that was not what he should have said. Antagonizing the scary sea monster was not a smart move. But on the other hand he desperately wanted a little clarification here. Maybe the word had another meaning?

Bucky’s smile was completely gone now. 

“No, like  _ soulmates _ . The person you’re destined to meet and love forever.” His voice got smaller. “Do you not have my name?”

Tony shook his head slowly and shallowly, so that his eyes never left Bucky’s teeth.

“I’ve never heard of anyone having a stranger’s name on their body because fate said so.”

Bucky slumped fully back into the water. He looked like he’d been stabbed in the gut. Tony had the sudden, desperate urge to take it back, to lie, to do something differently. Which was stupid, because everything he’s said was the truth, and he most definitely didn’t have  _ BUCKY _ written on his body, or any experience with tentacle sea monsters, so what other outcome could there have been?

He had a sudden vision of said tentacle sea monster’s sadness turning to rage, and backed up a little further. Those tentacles were probably good for gripping things, but didn’t look like they could support much weight. With a little head start, Tony could definitely outrun him, even with his backpack weighing him down. But where would he run to? The rock wasn’t that big, and he’d have to get back into the water to get to shore. 

Okay, so escape was a dead end. 

Bucky was still mostly submerged, but his expression was more distant than sad. He looked like he was deep inside himself, viewing some memory Tony couldn’t see and asking himself questions Tony couldn’t hear. It was disconcerting, but better than angry. 

Suddenly, Bucky shot back out of the water, tentacles waving in excitement. 

“You said no one you knew had them? So maybe it’s a human thing! You’re definitely my soulmate, I’m sure of that, so you must be my soulmate too. You just can’t tell as easily without my name.”

He nodded, like that was that and there was no other possible answer. 

Tony wasn’t sure if this was a positive development or not, but it certainly gave him an opening to try and get some control over the situation.

“You know what, maybe. Who knows. I certainly didn’t know mermaids existed until just now. Or rather, since last night, but same difference. Maybe soulmates are a thing, where you come from. But we don’t have that outside of stories.” The image of his mother clinging to his father and smiling for the cameras rose from the murky mess of his thoughts, but he pushed it back down. “So, how about we introduce ourselves again, this time without the soulmates intro? I’ll start. Hello, I’m Tony, I like science in general and engineering in particular, and I just recently came here. And who are you?”

Bucky’s tentacles glided over each other like directionally challenged snakes as he considered his answer. 

“Hello, my name is Bucky, I like cool tech and my best friend Steve, and I had a dream that I would meet my soulmate here so I left home in the dead of night without telling anyone to get here as fast as possible.”

He said each phrase carefully and deliberately, following the model Tony had given exactly, like he was afraid of getting it wrong. Tony smiled encouragingly, but inside he was wincing. This mermaid had dropped everything to come here on the off-chance that his dream about meeting a soulmate would work out? A guy like that wasn’t going to let go. He was going to have to flee to Arizona or somewhere without major bodies of water if he wanted to escape now. 

Then his brain caught up with his ears and realized that there were two much more important pieces of information buried in that introduction. First, he had a best friend. Implying that there were more mermaids swimming around out there. Second, he liked new tech. Implying that there was tech to be new, and old tech to compare the new tech to. Tony suddenly felt much less apprehensive about talking to the mermaid that might be able to eat him. Plus, Bucky might be smiling full-blast again, and that was all well and good, but Tony was pretty sure that if the conversation didn’t move along he’d find a way to ruin it and make the octopus-mermaid angry at him and get eaten, so he tried to steer the conversation towards more stable ground.

“So, new topic,” his mom would have stomped on his foot under the table so hard for a transition like that, “what’s the state of mermaid science?”

Bucky kept smiling, and Tony breathed a mental sigh of relief.

“That’s kind of a broad question, isn’t it?”

He told himself to stay on guard, but it was a lost cause. Bucky couldn’t have given a better answer if he tried.

“Pick anywhere you want to start. It’ll all be new to me.” He tried for patient and curious but even to his own ears he sounded like a little kid trying to hide his interest in the popsicles in the freezer. 

“Well, let’s see.” One of Bucky’s tentacles twisted around empty air, like it was twirling a pencil or something. “Not sure if this is what you’re thinking of, but magnetic gardens have been big lately. Some hotshot scientist figured out how to grow a bunch of anemones that conduct electricity, and that if you plant a lot of them right next to each other you can make a magnetic field, and then someone else experimented with it a whole bunch to figure out how to combine it with modified coral and stuff like that to manipulate and project the field, and so they went around planting a bunch of these gardens so that you could communicate with someone a long way away…”

Bucky’s rambling, unscientific explanations simultaneously calmed Tony down and revved him up. He barely noticed that he was inching forward a little bit at a time, so that if he wanted to Bucky could have easily wrapped a couple of tentacles around him and pulled him into the sea. He just couldn’t seem to care about dangers like that when this glorious octopus merman  _ (merman, he was going to settle on that, it was simpler… no wait, mermaid was more familiar. Ugh. This was hard.) _ was describing completely unfamiliar science to him, untechnical and imprecise though he may be. Here was a scientific world untouched by human scientific history! Some place that had gone in a completely different direction, that wasn’t affected by the scientific tradition that his father and various tutors had passed down to him. These scientist mermaids Bucky was describing were working along completely different lines of thought than anything Tony had ever encountered before, and it made him want to dive into the depths right now and see how long he could hold his breath. There were scientists that would kill to be in his shoes right now.

That thought brought him up short. 

There  _ were _ scientists that would kill to be in his shoes. His father would probably be first on the list. His mind flashed back to the drone photos that were still sitting on Rhodey’s laptop. In the MIT field lab. Where there were bound to be lots and lots of curious scientists who believed wholeheartedly in the importance of sharing information and  _ Isaac Newton riding a dolphin into the sunset _ , he was going to have to get rid of the evidence wasn’t he?

Bucky noticed his change in mood and his explanation of some deep-sea mermaid’s far-fetched plan to make photosynthesis obsolete awkwardly trailed off.

“Are you okay?”

Tony squashed down the sunny feeling that Bucky’s question triggered in his stomach. His father wasn’t here to remind him how pathetic it was to get all hung up over a little positive attention, so Tony would have to do it himself. 

“Yeah, no, I just had the sudden thought that I absolutely can’t tell anybody about you and that to that end I have to go break into my friend’s lab and destroy some incriminating photos.”

A cloud passed over Bucky’s face. 

“Yes, please do. You are my soulmate, so of course you are an exception, but -”

Tony had already hopped into the water and started back towards the beach.

“Yeah, so, um, I’ll go do that. And then I’ll come back tonight, and you can keep telling me about why a respected scientist doesn’t think the sun is necessary.” And Tony would try and figure out why it was that Bucky knew what a photo was. Did mermaids have cameras too?

It wasn’t until after he was around the rock again that he realized he’d hopped into the water with Bucky right there. 

* * *

Tony didn’t have a towel, so after parting ways with Bucky, he found a good log to sit on and waited for the sun to dry him. Once he was no longer dripping wet, he could change in the public bathrooms and go meet Rhodey at the field lab.  


With nothing to do but sit with his thoughts, he pondered what Bucky had said.

Soulmates.

It wasn’t that he was anti-love of anything. Far from it. He just didn’t really want romance in his life. Nothing good ever seemed to come from it. Case in point, his parents. His mom always talked about soulmates and fate and all those romantic tropes, and look who she was married to. He was pretty sure that she regretted marrying Howard, whether or not she’d ever admit it. He’d asked her once what she thought about divorce, when he was young and didn’t understand all of the undercurrents running through the Stark family. She’d been very clear that she didn’t see it as a legitimate option. 

She’d been very eager to set him up with various people his own age for the past couple of years; daughters of friends and fellow businessmen. Only Sunset Bain stood out in his memory, which was like saying that pitch black stood out against vaguely disgusting dishwater grey. 

About a year ago he’d decided to experiment with boys, behind his parents’ backs of course, but Tiberius Stone had been just as awful as Sunset had been, if not more so. 

Maybe his mother was right, and romance was out there somewhere for him. He didn’t really think Bucky was what she’d had in mind, but still. The general principle stood.

On the other hand, Bucky probably didn’t have a huge financial incentive to steal Tony’s ideas, belittle him in public or in private, suck up to him, or do any of the other things that the others had tried to do. So maybe he was an inherently better candidate than his mother’s choices.

And he liked Bucky’s smile. And how open he’d been. Tony was hard pressed to remember getting so much positive attention in one go since Jarvis was still looking after him. And let’s not forget the science.

However, the idea that fate was choosing his life partner for him made him want to rebel against something. What made fate a better judge than his mother? Based on what he knew of history, admittedly not his favorite subject, fate had made terrible choices all the time. Who would trust something with such a terrible track record with something that would drastically affect their lives?

He made a fist and clenched so that his nails bit into the soft flesh of his palm and forced himself to change tracks. Thinking about Bucky saying the word ‘soulmate’ made his skin crawl a little. 

Money. That was something safe to think about. The money he’d taken with him was going to run out eventually, and he was going to have to find a way of getting more, but he couldn’t do it in a way that would tip off the police. Something that didn’t require a lot of legal documents would be ideal. He’d had vague thoughts when he left of becoming a solitary scientist stereotype, slaving away in the field working to further science. Unfortunately, he needed a lab or some sort of home base with more storage space than a one-person tent for that. He’d also probably need some specialized equipment, and that wouldn’t come cheap. Rhodey’s access to the MIT lab was nice and all, but he had to go back east at some point, and Tony was in this for the long haul, so he needed to get cracking on setting himself up for a post-Rhodey world.

Well, not  _ entirely _ post-Rhodey. A little texting couldn’t hurt, if he could get his number. 

He had a stroke of genius about three minutes into definitely-not-thinking-about-Bucky when he saw some teenagers tapping away at their phones in a frenzy. Apps! He could make those with just code, sell them for cheap, and he’d never have to produce a bunch of legal identification! 

He pulled his computer out of his backpack. Thankfully, coding came easy to him. After two hours sitting by the high tide line with his computer, he’d coded a bunch of simple, beach-themed apps and put them up for sale. In between coding games, he added to his new-and-improved digital (read: recoverable in the event of another accident) notes to look up later. There were strange little flea-like things that jumped much higher than they rightfully should be able to from underneath damp seaweed, and sometimes seagulls bobbed past. The seaweed was mixed with long, honey-brown kelp and strings of some other aquatic plant he didn’t know the name of. After staring at the seaweed for a few minutes, he started on a game where prizes were tangled in seaweed and you had to get past various dangers to reach them.

Coding the games was fun, almost addictive. He found himself working right up until his computer’s battery died to make the graphics sharper and the animation smoother. 

When the battery finally gave in, he looked at the time and realized that he had been dry ages ago, and if he wanted to catch Rhodey he needed to get a move on. He put up his app for sale, then shut his computer and began forcing it inch by inch back into his overfull backpack.

He found Rhodey in the lab with the computer open, and for a heartbeat Tony wonders if he’d already seen the photos. But his new friend didn’t look overly excited, so he decided against it. 

“Hey Rhodey, what’s up?”

“Not much right this second, but your waterproof drone has been a huge hit. I told them it was all your idea, but without you here to fuss over they’ve been insufferable. You’re gonna have to talk to someone other than me before you head home, or they’re gonna accuse me of hogging you all to myself.”

Tony concentrated on not reacting to the ‘head home’ part, but Rhodey still noticed something off about his expression. 

“You okay?”

“It’s nothing. Let’s go see your fellow MIT nerds, it’ll be a good excuse for you to show me the rest of the field lab.”

Rhodey squinted at him.

“Your hair has dried seaweed in it. Also, the ends look like they’ve dried into sticks. Have you been swimming?”

“Yes?” 

“Why, man? The water’s freezing. We’ve got the North Pacific Gyre to thank for constantly chilly water even when it’s hot out. Besides, the whole point of making a drone that could go underwater was to avoid going in the water. Remember that thing you saw when we met?”

Considering he’d just been talking to it, yes he did.

“I… thought I saw an octopus. And… I didn’t have the drone on hand, so, you know. I had to get it the water myself.” Tony said hesitantly. It was as close to the truth as he could bear to get. Bucky had tentacles and lived in the water, so he was basically an octopus, right?

Rhodey just rolled his eyes. “Must have been some octopus. You planning on studying marine biology when you go to college?” He paused, then whipped around to look at Tony intensely. “Are you one of those child geniuses that get into college before they hit puberty?”

Tony stomped his foot. “I  _ have  _ hit puberty you ass, it just hasn’t delivered on the height yet.” 

Could he pass himself off as college student? He didn’t have any student ID, and if he lied Rhodey would probably ask which school he attended. Could he claim to have already gone to college? He knew more about engineering than the average bear, he could probably pass for an engineer. But if he said he had already graduated, then Rhodey would think he lived here, like, in a house. He might ask to see that house.   
But was the situation really all that different if he was truthful about his age? Rhodey probably already thought Tony lived here, and it was only a matter of time before he asked about school, if only to ask where Tony was thinking about applying. Tony didn’t go to college, but he also didn’t go to high school. Howard had been strict about private tutors for any subject related to SI, and boarding school for background knowledge. He’d never set foot in a public school in his life, and he couldn’t say he went to boarding school or Rhodey would ask why he wasn’t _boarding_ at said boarding school right now!

What the hell. He was already sitting upon a throne of lies by omission, might as well add one honest - to - goodness lie in there.

“And for your information, I have graduated, and no, I didn’t study marine biology, interesting though it is. I was an engineering and physics double major, computer science minor, concentration in systems engineering.” To be honest, that’s what he would have done had he actually been to college. Most of those shared required classes anyway. “I like any sort of science, though.”

Rhodey whistled. “Impressive. I’m working on an engineering degree, but I haven’t picked what sort of engineering I want to do yet. That’s part of what the drone was for, actually. I wanted to try my hand at mechanical engineering. Though the longer I spend out here, the more I think I should bite the bullet and just switch to computer engineering. Where did you go to school?”

“University of Southern California.” That was the only one he could think of off the top of his head that he was one hundred percent sure was in California.

“Huh. Must be weird, graduating while you’re still a kid. Working on your masters, or are you tired of school yet?”

“Yeah, I start in the fall. Now, you promised me fellow science nerds?”

“Right, right. I don’t know where everyone is right this second, since a lot of people left about twenty minutes ago on an ice cream run, but I’m pretty sure Bruce is still here. Hey Bruce! You said you wanted to meet Tony!”

The most unassuming man Tony had ever met in his life shuffled into view with a faintly steaming cup of tea and a fluffy bathrobe masquerading as a lab coat. He looked first at Rhodey, then seemed to process what he’d said and turned to look at Tony.

“Hello! Rhodey didn’t make you up after all.” He extended his hand for Tony to shake. “You did a good job with the drone. Any chance you’ll be hanging around this summer?”

As though Tony would ever turn down an opportunity to science out with MIT students. 

“You bet I am.”

* * *

On his way out the door, he made sure to discreetly delete the drone photo files. He’d find a way to make it up to Rhodey later.  


* * *

Tony held his phone above his head inside a couple of clear plastic sandwich bags to light his way through the darkness and hoped he wasn’t about to step on something dangerous as he waded back out to the rock that evening. The bottom felt more treacherous and unstable in the low light. It was a relief to finally reach the rock without incident. He clamored up onto the same partially submerged rock ledge as before and took a moment to catch his breath. It was getting easier to carry around the heavy backpack, to his delight.  


Sure enough, after only a few minutes of waiting, Bucky rose like a pale corpse out of the dark water. His teeth glinted in Tony’s phone light. 

“You came back!” He said cheerfully. 

“I promised, didn’t I?” Tony replied. “But I can’t stay for long. All of my stuff is still with my friend Rhodey, and I have to go back and pick it up soon, or he’ll send out a search party for me.” Not strictly true, but it gave him a pre-established out should this second meeting go sour.

Bucky’s smile didn’t waver.

“That’s okay. You’ll be back tomorrow.”

“You’re awful sure of that. What makes you think I won’t disappear into the ether tomorrow with cool mermaid pictures and the best ‘what I did this summer’ essay anyone’s ever seen?” Tony joked, but inside it felt like one of Bucky’s tentacles was curling around unpleasantly in his intestines. 

“You’re my soulmate. Even if you did, you’d be back.”

“Any other reason?” Tony  _ really  _ didn’t want to go back to the soulmate discussion. 

Bucky thought about it for a few seconds. One of his tentacles did that twisty twirling-an-invisible-pencil thing. It was very distracting. 

“Because if you stay, I’ll tell you all about mermaid science?” He sounded much less sure about this reason, but Tony greatly prefered it to the ‘we’re destined to have an epic romance’ one.

“There we go! Now, I believe last time you mentioned camouflage tech, and I am all ears. I sort of wondered how no one had caught a mermaid on camera before.”


	2. Dana Octopus Squid

The next morning Tony awoke to find that he had money now. Not Stark money, but enough that he wouldn’t have to dig into his preloaded cash cards for some basic groceries and a snorkeling mask just yet, with perhaps a little bit left over to apply towards the monthly phone bill for the shiny new untouched-by-Howard phone he’d bought right before leaving home. He added it to the secret account he’d set up a few months before leaving home and mentally recalculated his financial situation.

He’d slept a little later than yesterday, but it was still far earlier than he would have woken up back in New York. He was pretty sure it was the sunlight penetrating the tent walls that was waking him.

He got dressed in his sleeping bag so he wouldn’t have to leave its warmth just yet. It meant he had to shimmy around a lot, and he usually ended up unzipping the bag just a little so he could move his arms effectively, but he was getting better at it. Once he’d gotten his clothes on, he reached down into the bottom, past where his feet sat during the night, for his shoes. He’d read that campers put their shoes inside their sleeping bags to keep them warm, and while that wasn’t a problem in sunny California, he figured it would also help keep critters out. The last thing he wanted to do was stick his feet in his sneakers only to find that something had crawled in overnight and was feeling territorial. 

Once he was dressed and everything was packed, he set off for the coffee shop from the other day. Since seeing his own wanted poster he’d tried to avoid the place, but he needed to charge his phone and he didn’t know where the library was yet. He mentally added that to his list of things to look up today. 

He bought his coffee as quickly as possible, and tried his best not to stand out, which probably just made him stand out even more. He consciously didn’t look at the space between all the other flyers and announcements on the cork board where he knew his own much-cleaner face was staring back at him. When the lady behind the counter asked for his name, he told her it was Edwin. 

He rolled that name around on his tongue while he waited, and quickly decided that he couldn’t pursue it seriously as a fake name. Edwin felt too old-fashioned for him. If he was going to use a formal, uncomfortable name, his own Anthony worked just as well as anything else. Oh well. It probably wasn’t  _ that _ important. Rhodey still hadn’t asked for a last name. 

He logged into the cafe wifi and began running through his list of searches. Based on the first map of the area he could find, there was a public library two streets over and three up. If he went a little further over and only two streets up, there was a sort of shopping district. That probably wasn’t the right way to describe it, but Tony was used to shopping districts the size of city districts. This was a single street with a grocery store, a bookstore, another cafe, a clothing store, an antique shop, an ice cream shop with seasonal hours, a pizza place and some sort of boating and fishing gear shop. Was it normal for towns to have shopping streets instead of districts? He racked his brains, but he couldn’t seem to remember ever shopping in a town as small as this one. 

He followed up on some of the conspiracy theories and urban legends he’d found the last time he was here, but quickly abandoned them. The mermaids they described sounded nothing like Bucky. 

The search for Tony Stark continued at the same frenzied pace as before, but with no solid leads it was starting to slip from the national news. Instead of stories about his disappearance and a glut of interviews, the trending stories now were much less interesting updates to previous stories and more in-depth speculative pieces about why he might have disappeared. Unfortunately, at the state and city level the story was still going strong. New Yorkers were well-attuned to the name Stark, and the various interviews were much more rewarding for an audience who knew something about the Stark family to begin with. 

So long as they were still looking in Maine and nearby parts of Canada, though, he was satisfied. 

Howard must have made a new statement last night, since quite a few articles were just different journalists re-hashing his quotes. He got bored after scrolling through one or two of those. That sort of thing was much more fun when the conspiracy theorists were the ones doing it.

While he was thinking of it, he checked up on various New York conspiracy pages he’d been following for their entertainment value for a while now. Sure enough, his name popped up on a couple of threads, but upon a closer look none of them were even close to the truth. He hadn’t been kidnapped by aliens or any shady organizations, and if there was time travel involved in this whole mess, he certainly didn’t know about it. 

He sipped his coffee and stared at the battery icon on his phone as it crawled like an old, dry slug towards full. 

Most of the stores on that shopping street were either useless or impractical for him, but the grocery store was probably a good idea. He had snack food in his backpack, but it was quickly running out, and he couldn’t necessarily count on Rhodey feeding him lunch at the field lab every day. After that, he’d peek into the boating and fishing store and see what they were selling. If they had some sort of snorkel mask, that might be useful. It would probably be expensive, but it would be worth it to be able to see underwater. Since meeting Bucky, he foresaw a lot of swimming in his future.

The walk to the boating and fishing store was pleasant. The sun had risen high enough to get over the buildings, but wasn’t high enough yet that there was no refuge to be had from the heat. The air was much lighter and less humid than in New York during the same time of year, and he passed at least three dogs on the way. 

His first impression of the store was of disappointment. The front window was filled with sporty-looking sunglasses and large men’s t-shirts with fishing jokes printed across the chest. He ducked inside anyway, hoping that what he was looking for was further inside the store. 

A sleepy dog looked up at him from it’s cushion near the check-out counter, wagged its tail happily, and then put its head back down and resumed resting. There was no one behind the counter, but he heard an authoritative sounding voice coming from around the corner, so he could only assume that someone was here and in charge, even if he couldn’t see them. Carefully handmade, laminated signs were stapled to the sides of each wood shelf, declaring this row to be  _ fishing hooks, lures, and lines _ and the next one to be  _ fishing poles, standard sizes.  _

He turned into the  _ scuba/snorkeling headgear, goggles, masks _ aisle. Most of the goggles were clearly meant for little kids, and were way to small. The snorkel masks, on the other hand, were mostly meant for grown adults, and were way too big for him. He could get the strap tightened enough to keep it on his head, sure, but the mask part extended too far to either side so that no matter how tightly he pressed it to his face, there were always gaps between the plastic and his skin. Besides, the nose indentation covered his upper lip. Even the ones with pink straps, which were presumably for women and therefore hopefully smaller, were simply too big for his face. There clearly wasn’t much of a snorkel gear market for small teenagers. 

The scuba masks showed more promise, but most of them were way too expensive for him to even try on. In the end, he picked up a cheap plastic one that was small and minimalist in design. It was probably cheap for a reason, but he’d work around it.   
By the time he came up to the counter with his purchases, someone was there to take his money. A Polynesian man with extensive tattoos made small talk with him about the good weather and a recent study linking ultraviolet light exposure with lower rates of depression that had been getting a lot of publicity. It wasn’t until Tony went to hand over his debit card that he realized this was the first time he’d ever used it. 

The sudden jolt of fear was completely irrational. If Howard had found out about his secret bank account, he wouldn’t have let Tony think he got away from it. He’d never had a problem making deposits, so he shouldn’t have a problem making withdrawals. Using his card wasn’t going to make a little siren go off while a disembodied robotic voice informed everyone that he was a runaway with a reward on his head. 

He still had to disguise a sigh of relief when the chip reader accepted his card without issue. 

After that, it was a short walk to the grocery store. He spent the whole walk there reminding himself that he should only buy practical things that he actually needed, because he’d have to carry all of it around until he ate it. And since he couldn’t refrigerate anything, could only access a microwave in the MIT field lab, and didn’t have a can opener or an oven, that meant he had to focus on things like bread, fruit, and health bars. 

He was mostly able to stick to that goal, but he caved and bought some chocolate as well. He justified it by telling himself that since Bucky had probably never had chocolate, he just had to get some to share with him. No one should live without knowing the taste of chocolate. 

The walk back was a little slower, since he had bags full of groceries now, but he figured he could stop by the MIT field lab and clean out his dirty tupperware containers there so he could put the food in there and ditch the plastic bags.

* * *

Showing up at the field lab of course meant that he ended up getting roped into helping Rhodey with one of his drone projects. Which wasn’t a problem- Tony loved helping Rhodey with anything and everything drone related. Even when that help involved going with Rhodey to retrieve the drone when it crash-landed in an abandoned bird nesting ground.

The objective was to test out the drone’s camera and identify any bugs that would need to be fixed later, back at the lab. Rhodey piloted the drone, keeping it well away from the water out of lingering concern that something big was lurking just beyond the shallows. Tony had a sneaking suspicion that the large shadow he’d seen had been Bucky trying to approach him, but he couldn’t really assuage Rhodey’s fears without telling him about Bucky, so he kept his mouth shut and retrieved the drone whenever it went down. After bringing it back, he and Rhodey would look over the results and throw out some ideas about how to fix any of the bugs they noticed and geeked out over the features that performed better than expected.

Between the bird droppings, sand, seaweed, and sweat from standing for hours under the California sun, both he and Rhodey ended up getting absolutely filthy. They had to hose each other off before entering the lab after realizing that they probably counted as some sort of biohazard, or at the very least walking contaminants. Hosing each other off turned into a short water fight. They unleashed torrents of water at each other’s faces, and tried to duck and weave around the ornamental shrubs planted around the property. Tony was hard to hit as he dashed from bush to bush on quick feet, but Rhodey had been in way more water fights than Tony had, so they were pretty evenly matched.

That game didn’t last long, since it was hot enough outside that getting hit with cool, clean water wasn’t much of a motivation to not get hit. Eventually they gave up and headed inside, now marginally cleaner, to take a shower. 

The shower was heaven to Tony. He hadn’t realized just how grimey he had gotten from camping out in the woods and spending every day in the sun until he had soap and shampoo thrust into his hands. Dirt and sand sloughed off him with the clean, warm water, and he realized that he hadn't tanned quite as much as he’d thought. 

When he finally stepped out from under the showerhead, he felt almost remade. Like a talented blacksmith had melted him down and recrafted him into a similar but superior shape. His skin was clean for the first time since he’d left home, and his hair was soft to the touch now that the sweat and seawater had been washed away. 

“Not as nice as showering in your own home, you know, but it’s alright,” Rhodey commented. “Probably should have let you wait until you got home to clean up, but Bruce might kick us out himself if we hung around any of the labs with seaweed still drying to our ears.”

Tony nodded ambiguously and tried to pretend that he most certainly did have a home with a shower and running water while mentally he plotted how he was going to get into that shower again. Preferably sooner rather than later.

* * *

The warmth of the shower clung to his skin all the way until the evening, when he was supposed to go meet up with Bucky again. The sight of the sandy, seaweed-strewn water almost made him decide to cancel their rendezvous on the spot. He hadn’t realized how much he missed being clean until stepping into the shower at the field lab. His hair wasn’t plastered down to his neck in an oily mess, and the novelty of the lack of dirt and dried seawater on his skin had yet to ware off. If he waded out to the rock, his feet would get sandy and dirt would stick to his wet skin when he went back ashore to pitch his tent and when he woke up tomorrow his legs would feel salty.

On the other hand, he didn’t really want to stand Bucky up on this nightly meet-up routine that they’d fallen into over the past few days. He was sort of afraid that Bucky would take it into his head to tentacle-walk up out of the ocean and come find him if he didn’t show up. Besides, he didn’t stand a chance at resisting the mermaid science Bucky used to lure him into animated conversation. It was just so interesting!

So, salty skin it was. 

The water was cold, and the wet sand felt like it was leeching all the warmth in his body directly from the vein along the bottom of his foot. By the time he reached the rock, the warmth of the shower would be nothing more than a fond memory.

All of a sudden, it wasn’t sand under his feet and his world was tipping sideways. The soft, slippery caress of wet seaweed told him a second too late that he’d run into a rock peeking out from underneath the sand. He scrambled for balance, which resulted in loud splashes. To his ears, it almost sounded like they were echoing. If anyone was still on the beach now that the sun had set, they had certainly heard him. A stinging pain jolted up his leg, but he ignored it in favor of trying to keep his backpack out of the water. 

Once he’d regained his balance he continued on slowly, taking the time to feel the ground under his foot before putting his weight on it. 

When he reached the other side of the rock, Bucky was already waiting for him on the ledge. He’d heaved his whole body up onto dry land, and his tentacles trailed down the rock ledge down into the water. They were much longer than Tony had somehow thought they were.

Bucky is, as he had been every time they met, overjoyed to see him.

“Tony! You took so long, I was afraid you weren’t coming. But of course you’d come.” 

He said that last bit to himself, as if he deserved admonition for doubting that Tony would come. Or rather, for doubting that his soulmate would come. Tony still wasn’t sure how much of his puppy-love was Tony’s own qualities as a person and how much was just Bucky’s ardent belief in the power and importance of soulmates.

“Yeah, I came.”

He hauled himself up onto the rock and set his backpack down. He was getting better at carrying it as the days went on. Maybe he’d actually get some upper body muscles out of this whole running away thing.

Getting out of the water, however, revealed a problem. Blood was snaking bright red trails down his leg from several parallel cuts along his shin and the top of his foot. Now that he was out of the water and it wasn’t being immediately washed away, it flowed sluggishly down towards the sand bottoms of his feet. It was just sticky enough to stay almost entirely on his skin, but when he moved he left a little bit of blood behind on the rock. That explained the pain he’d felt earlier when he’d slipped on his way out here. He must have cut himself on barnacles, or maybe oyster shells. He’d seen way more barnacles than oysters, though, so probably barnacles.

The cuts didn’t really hurt anymore, but the flowing ribbons of red screamed for attention. Bucky’s eyes fixated on them the moment they became visible. He reached out on of his long tentacles, but stopped himself before actually touching Tony, so that the tapered tip hovered like a pointed finger a few inches from the cuts. 

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Tony said as he sat down in the spot he’d grown accustomed to. It didn’t escape him that Bucky had dragged himself awful close to his spot, but he didn’t say anything. “I didn’t even realize I was bleeding until just now. It’s fine.”

Bucky’s eyes remained firmly locked onto his leg. 

“I have something I can put on that. Wait just a second.” 

He launched himself back into the water and quickly passed out of sight in the dark water. Tony help up his phone, but the light just bounced back off the surface of the water. 

When Bucky returned a minute later, one of his tentacles was wrapped around what looked like a piece of fabric, or maybe an aquatic leaf. It was droopy and a sort of dull green. Bucky’s tentacle was wrapped around it pretty tightly, so whatever it was likely wasn’t delicate.

“This will stop the bleeding,” he said. 

Cautiously, he extended two tentacles towards Tony. It took him embarrassingly long to figure out that he was trying not to avoid scaring him with slow, telegraphed movements. Which in turn lead him to wonder how he actually felt about letting Bucky touch him. He’d always maintained a healthy space between since that first time when Bucky had rested a tentacle on his leg and Tony had backed out from underneath it, and Bucky had always respected that, but would this change that? Would Bucky want to touch him all the time now? Did Bucky need to be touching him? If Bucky could explain what the thing he was holding was and what he wanted him to do with it, Tony could probably deal with this himself. 

He’d been too slow on the uptake. His mind was still spinning a mile a minute trying to figure out if he should stop Bucky when the first tentative tentacle brushed against his leg. 

“I’m going to wrap this around where it’s bleeding, and hold it for a little bit, okay?” Bucky explained. “It shouldn’t take too long.”

Two tentacles wrapped the thing around his cuts like a bandage, but did nothing to tie it off. Instead, a third tentacle wrapped around his lower leg like a creeping vine and held it in place. Little suckers on the underside of the tentacle pulsed minutely. After about thirty seconds, the tentacle unwound and carefully unwrapped his leg. The cuts were completely gone.

Tony poked his shins, but no blood oozed out from anywhere. All of the cuts were closed. The deepest one had left a small, silvery scar, but other than that there was no evidence that he’d ever been hurt.

It was like there was fireworks going off in Tony’s brain. This was the first time he’d seen mermaid tech up close and personal, rather than just hearing about it from Bucky, and it was amazing. How did it work? Was it coated in something, perhaps? A chemical reaction? Would Bucky let him borrow it for a bit? Of course he would, Bucky would probably let him do anything, but should he? Rhodey might see it, or his backpack might get stolen - it wasn’t like he had any sort of personal security or any good places to stash something like this. 

He settled for a simple starter question. He couldn’t keep thinking of it as the fabric thing, especially now that he had feltl it against his skin and it  _ really _ didn’t feel like fabric.

“What’s this called?” 

Bucky paused, clearly struggling for a word. One tentacle did that twisty thing Tony was learning to read as ‘thinking hard.’

“It’s… I don’t know a human word for it.”

Tony was abruptly reminded of his initial surprise that Bucky spoke English.

“Is there a not-human word for it?”

Bucky nodded. He hummed, and the tentacle that had been twisting in midair suddenly flattened and turned the same dull green as the object, then darkened to black, then quickly turned back to green. A white stripe rippled down the length of the tentacle like a floppy ring. It stood out clearly against both the black and the green, so it remained visible no matter where it was on the tentacle. When it flashed back to green, the white ring reached the tip of the tentacle. It was a very coordinated display. 

Yep, that was pretty difficult to translate.  _ Dull green fades to black flashes to green again with falling, uneven white ring _ was even worse than  _ the fabric thing Bucky was holding. _ Wait, was the humming important too? He’d been paying so much attention to the color, he couldn’t remember what sort of hum Bucky had been making.

“Can you do that again please?”

Bucky obliged, once again humming as the colors flashed. So the humming was probably important. 

More important was the sudden discovery that all of this unknown-to-humans tech Bucky had access to came with an unknown-to-humans language. 

Tony had never wanted to learn a language more than he did right then. Back home he’d had to slave over vocab lists and grammar lessons because Howard saw the value in learning ‘important languages’ for business reasons, but he’d never felt any real inner motivation to learn those languages other than to avoid his father’s wrath. This wasn’t like that at all. This was a door that had swung open just enough to let some light through, and he desperately wanted to throw the door open and see what was on the other side. 

Were there multiple mermaid languages? What sort of logic and structure did they use? Were there regional dialects, and how would you do that? A slightly different shade in the colors you flashed? Most importantly: would this new language help him understand the new science better? Bucky described things for him up until now, but he just didn’t know enough about the inner workings of tech he took for granted to clear up some of Tony’s confusion. There was so much science vocabulary just waiting for him to discover! Even if he couldn’t speak this language, could he learn to understand it?

Maybe he could write a program for his phone to make it flash colors like that? He didn’t see why it wouldn’t be possible. The humming, on the other hand, would be harder. Most humming just sounded like humming to him. Sure, dramatic shifts in pitch registered, but there was probably a bunch of tone stuff going on that he wasn’t picking up on at all.

When he turned back to Bucky to ask him to demonstrate another word, his request withered in his throat. Bucky was hunched in on himself, and two of his his tentacles had gone rigid, and were perfectly poised to push him backwards into the water. He looked  _ hunted. _ Like he expected Tony to lunge at him in anger. The tentacles that weren’t busy holding the not-fabric to his cuts or preparing to abort tonight’s meeting started running over each other in a sort of controlled writhe. Tony was pretty sure he’d never seen his body language so unsure before.

“Hey, are you okay?” He asked. 

Bucky blinked, then smiled. It was the shakiest smile of his Tony had seen yet.

“Of course! I’m always fine when I’m with you.”

Tony raised a skeptical eyebrow. 

“You don’t look fine.”

“I can change that,” Bucky replied with a playful smirk. His expression was firmer and more confident than before, but still not as confident as normal, and there was an underlying tenseness that hadn’t eased. Tony recognized that tenseness; he carried it in his own body whenever he’d screwed up around someone that might report back to his father. 

He shoved that aside and focused on what Bucky was doing. 

Before Tony’s eyes, all eight of his tentacles turned dark purple. The color spread from the thickest part of the tentacles to the thinnest, then up his human chest to his otter-brown hair. He winked at him, then let little white circles start floating around across his body. The look on Bucky’s face made him think it was less of a display and more of a short warm-up. 

All of a sudden, Bucky’s tentacles erupted in an explosion of color.

Tony startled back a little as each little sucker on the bottom of his tentacles pulsed through each color of the rainbow, while the upper areas turned dark green. White blobs like barnacles sprung up across the green skin. 

The colors slowly stabilized into a mottled pattern of overlapping dots. When Bucky held them all up together, it looked like he was holding a bouquet painted by an impressionist, with the green parts of the tentacles looking like a thick group of stems. He offered the illusion of a bouquet to Tony with an exaggerated bow.

Tony laughed but didn’t reach for them. 

“That’s amazing. How do you get so many different colors? Is there some sort of chemical response?” Bucky smiled, let his limbs fall to rest on the rock, and launched into a summary of everything he knew about coloration and color changing. 

While Bucky’s mood rapidly improved, Tony was still troubled. He’d only seen Bucky’s existential joy at finding his supposed soulmate shaken twice. The first was when Tony had told him that he didn’t have Bucky’s name. What could shake him as much as doubt that Tony was his soulmate? He mentally ran over the past few minutes, searching for a hint. Was it what he’d said about hiding? No, his mood had started to recover when he’d demonstrated his camouflage. It was something before that. But before that he’d just been demonstrating a word. Why would using his own language make him upset?

As much as he was burning with questions, he swallowed them back for the moment. Bucky’s shaken face was almost enough to shake  _ him. _ Instead, he started chatting inanely about his own day, hoping to move them away from the whole incident. Sure enough, Bucky perked right up at the chance to soak up more information about his soulmate. 

He had just finished a light complaint about how annoying it was to constantly pitch and then take down his tent when Bucky spoke again.

"You could just pitch your tent out here. This rock is probably big enough, and you always bring that backpack with you, so you know it wouldn't be a problem to transport it."

Bucky said it lightly, but Tony could hear the sly undercurrent he was trying to hide. Like Tony wouldn't immediately realize that this little suggestion of his would have Tony living within easy tentacle reach if he didn't draw attention to it. While it would be nice to have a semi- permanent home base to return to, he wasn't sure he was comfortable sleeping with Bucky nearby just yet. The mermaid hadn't given up on the whole 'we're soulmates and we're going to live happily ever after' shtick yet, though he didn't bring it up directly very often. He had never tried to keep Tony on the island by force, but he still felt skittish at the idea of letting his guard down. Between his teeth, those long, clever tentacles, and his heavily muscled torso and singular human arm,Bucky could be dangerous if he wanted to be.

"And you wouldn't have to set it up and take it down all the time, because you're the only human that comes here."

Tony stared.

"How do you know for sure that I'm the only one who comes here?" He asked tentatively. He didn't really know what Bucky did with his time when Tony wasn’t around, but he’d sort of assumed he went off and did mermaid things.  "Couldn't people have come while you were away?"

"I haven't left since finding you," Bucky said with a smile.

"Are you eating?" Surely he was leaving to eat. How long had he been here? A few days? He had to have left to eat.

"There are many delicious clams and shrimp near this rock. Even when there aren't, it is no hardship to do without for a bit. It takes a long time for a lack of food to really affect me, and it takes a long time to die of starvation. It is more important to be here in case you come during the day  or later at night."

Tony tried to sort out the jumble of emotions that ignited deep in his stomach.

“How long have you been… doing that?”

Bucky’s eyes rolled backwards and the colors of his tentacles shifted a little, like they were iridescent. The mermaid equivalent of counting days under your breath? Small waves crashed against the rocks a few times before he shrugged and turned back to Tony. “Not long before you got here. I waited for a long enough to catch and enough little clams to be full for an entire day before I saw you, but when I tried to get close to you, you fell back onto the beach and didn’t come back into the water. Then when it got dark, I saw you on the beach again with another human, and you flew a camera into the water. I tried to get in front of it so you would see your name on my arm and know that I was your soulmate, but the camera moved so erratically that I wasn’t sure I’d managed it. Then enough time passed to scout out the whole bay before you came out to the rock.”

So Bucky was the shadow in the water that had surprised him on that first day.

"You really don't have to do that."

Bucky was probably overfishing this whole area. What even was 'here,' by Bucky's definition? Within sight of the rock? How long would such a small area support such a big predator? Come to think of it, how much did Bucky need to eat? Half of him looked human, sure, but he didn't know anything about the eating habits of cephalopods, much less cephalopod mermaids.  


He remembered the chocolate from his morning grocery run that he’d intended to share with Bucky. Maybe it would be worth it to stock up on some other foods to share, if only to make sure it wasn’t his fault Bucky was starving.

Bucky seemed confused. He lifted a long, thick tentacle out of the water, the paused uncertainly, like he had realized mid-movement that whatever he was going to do was probably a bad idea, and now he didn't know how to complete the motion. Then he let it sag down again and draped it around his own shoulders. It hung down into the water, and Tony could just make out the thinner, curled tip.  
  
"But I am happy to stay, Tony. This way, I get to see you every day!”

What could he really say against that? What could he say that would convince Bucky the Octopus Mermaid Wonder that there might be something wrong with him potentially disrupting or destroying a local ecosystem via overexploitation of resources and then starving himself when that overexploitation left him with no food just so he could make sure he was always available for someone he met just a few days ago whose name just so happened to be written on his arm?

It was creepy. It was probably bad for Bucky’s health. It made Tony feel guilty for not jumping on the Magical Soulmates Who Will Love Each Other Forever train, which in turn made him angry for having been made to feel guilty. 

But he couldn’t say that. Stark men may be made of Iron, but he must be made of the shitty, low-grade iron or something because he was  _ weak _ to Bucky’s immediate and so far constant adoration. Bucky’s effort to keep him interested with mermaid science and the way he listened intently to Tony just talk about his day were sweet, and Tony wondered if this was what unconditional love was supposed to be like. Which invariably reminded him that it wasn’t unconditional, it was completely conditional upon Tony’s name being written on Bucky’s arm. None of that devotion was inspired by anything Tony had said or did, but by “fate.” Bucky had been devoted to him before he even met him, and he probably would have been devoted to him no matter what he said or did. It wasn’t like he mattered as a person, just as a concept.

He dug around in his bag for the chocolate. It was a little soft from the heat of the day, but it was still dry. He broke the bar in two and handed half to Bucky. 

“Here, take some. I don’t want your death by starvation on my conscience.”

Bucky accepted the chocolate with a little too much pressure, and the half-melted chocolate warped around the shape of his tentacle. Tony winced, but Bucky just started eating it off of the tentacle. He carefully licked it, then made a shocked noise. Another lick, and he was tentacles were quivering and turning a lighter shade of purple. 

“This is so good! How did you know I would like this so much?”

“It’s chocolate. Everyone likes it.”

Bucky ate the rest of it diligently, like Tony had offered him something rare or important. His tongue slid between each suction cup, making sure there wasn’t so much as a smear left unconsumed. If they hadn’t just been talking about Bucky’s terrible eating habits, Tony was pretty sure the sight would have made his pants awkwardly tight.

Which wouldn’t have meant anything, of course. He was a teenager, and teenage boys got erections at the drop of a hat. He wasn’t attracted to Bucky, and he certainly wasn’t going to date him after knowing him for all of a few days, especially when Bucky was so unnervingly focused on their  _ predestined love affair. _

The warmth from the shower was completely gone, and he began to shiver.

* * *

The library was a short, charming two story building that looked like only one story as it was built into a hill. It had large windows to make the most of the California sun, and through them he could see teenagers sitting on window seats, reading or tapping away at their phone. A small garden wrapped almost all the way around; a modest gravel parking lot broke the circle. There were some outdoor benches, and the area was strategically planted with vibrant evergreen plants and dramatic, flowering bushes. An enormous butterfly bush commanded a court of vibrant butterflies that flitted about like pixies, adding just a hint of magic to the place.

The handle to the tall, heavy front doors was a vertical shaft of polished wood about half a meter long. Pulling on it conjured up images of knights pulling open the doors to grand castles. 

A rush of cooler air brushed across his face as he entered the air conditioned foyer, and he shivered just once before adjusting to the cooler temperature. 

Thankfully his large backpack didn’t appear to be drawing too many looks as he scurried over to a likely-looking spot with a free outlet to charge his phone near an armchair over in the nonfiction section. Maybe they got a lot of backpackers through here. Certainly the sleeping bag tied to the bottom made it difficult to mistake for a typical high schooler’s backpack. 

Once his phone was plugged in, he began scanning nearby shelves for anything related to marine biology, mermaids, or cephalopods. Unfortunately, he wasn’t in the right spot for those books; he seemed to have unconsciously found his way into the Science and Technology area.

He wasn’t quite willing to leave the armchair and its accompanying outlet in search of the right section just yet, though, so he settled a little lower in the chair and set about looking up things he’d had questions about when he’d read through the courses he’d downloaded earlier at the coffee shop, right before he’d met Bucky. He’d taken to reading them before going to sleep, almost like a science bedtime story. 

The cephalopod sections in particular he made sure to read closely, especially the parts about their surprising intelligence. He didn’t know yet if the similarities between Bucky’s tentacles and octopus tentacles were merely superficial, or if there was some sort of relation. It sounded implausible if not outright impossible, but so did much of Bucky’s existence. 

The neurological articles on cephalopod intelligence, both what it was capable of and how it differed from human intelligence, caught his attention the way a thorny blackberry vine catches on clothing. He’d try to move on to more pertinent inquiries, like the physical abilities and limitations of the tentacles, only to get sucked back to the subject of their brains. There was just so much no one knew about their intelligence yet, and what was known was fascinating. For instance, one article he read talked about neuron placement in octopuses, and how most neurons were in the arms, and that each arm could move, taste, and touch independently of the brain. And that their brain, such as it was, shared no common anatomy with mammalian or even vertebrate brains, but still had similar functions and abilities. 

It made him wonder where Bucky fell in all of this. He had a human head and torso, so it made sense to assume he had a human-like brain. But did he control each tentacle then? Or could they act independently? If so, then did that mean his brain wasn’t human-like? Did the differences between his anatomy and human anatomy necessarily imply that his brain couldn’t be exactly like a human’s, if only because he had to coordinate more limbs, most of which were fundamentally different from human limbs, and therefore would require different brain structure to do so? 

Before he knew it, the librarian was walking around telling everyone that closing time was in fifteen minutes, so they best finish up whatever it was they were working on. He unplugged his phone, picked up his backpack, and headed out to meet with Bucky. It was a little earlier than he normally went, but hey. After that insane little conversation he’d had with the merman yesterday, he could be pretty sure Bucky would be there anyway. 

He hated that Bucky was doing this. He wished he wouldn’t do things like starve himself and stay in one place waiting for him every day. It would be easier to pretend that the whole soulmate thing wasn’t hanging over his head if he could get through a conversation without Bucky casually mentioning his self-destructive levels of devotion. It made Tony feel like he should reciprocate, but Bucky was still just a friend. A very cool friend, who knew about mermaid tech and had tentacles, but still just someone he met mere days ago. 

He shook himself, and pushed any and all thoughts about Bucky away. Then he checked the level of the sun in the sky, and started walking back to the spot he’d been pitching his tent each night. He didn’t want to have to set up in the dark.

He’d seen Bucky tomorrow and maybe get some of the questions that had come up in his research answered.

* * *

The problem with talking to Bucky was that Tony always arrived at their meeting rock with an organized list of questions, but once he got there he would get sidetracked talking about mermaid science.  

Case in point: he showed up today fully intending to ask Bucky about the whole language thing. Where did he learn English? Did he speak other human languages? Did mermaids have multiple languages, or did the whole visual element of the language mean everyone understood each other? The closest human equivalent that came to mind was sign language, and he’d heard that you could usually make yourself understood to someone who spoke a different sign language than you, but now that he thought about it he couldn’t remember where he’d heard that. Maybe he should look into sign language, just in case he met some other mermaids who didn’t conveniently speak English? Or maybe just learn Bucky’s language and program something into his phone to make the flashing colors and humming for him? 

He might have to tread lightly around it or not ask it at all, depending on how Bucky reacted to the less accusatory questions, but there was also the question of why Bucky had been so upset earlier, when he’d modeled the word for the cloth-thing for him. He wanted to know, but at the same time he thought that maybe this was the sort of question it would be better if he didn’t ask. 

He’d start with the more neutral questions for now. 

Set in his plan, he’d gone out to the rock only to be immediately distracted by a piece of tech Bucky wanted to show him. 

“It’s a small, long-distance communicator that you can carry around with you,” Bucky explained. “Remember those anemone gardens I told you about, back when we first met? This is sort of like that.”

He held up a sort of  polished rock with several strange-looking anemones and other not-quite-plants growing like mushrooms out of it. Tony wasn’t even sure if all of those organisms had been discovered by humans. Was he the first person to ever see these things? 

“They’re much smaller, so they’re a little more limited in what they can do than the big gardens, but you can’t carry a garden around with you. They send and receive signals to the nearest magnetic garden. I heard someone figured out how to get them to send and receive from other portable ones as well as the bigger gardens, but I haven’t seen it for myself yet.”

Tony’s eyes were glued to the device. To his eyes, it looked like another sealife-encrusted rock, but the many readings he’d done on bioengineering for his tutors back home kept him looking for something out of the ordinary about it.

“Does it change colors like your tentacles do, or does it send messages some other way?” he asked. 

“It changes colors, which is why I have it up here.”

“What do you mean?” 

Bucky looked sheepish.

“Well, I told you that I set out to find you as soon as I woke up from the dream that said you would be here. It was all very sudden, but I had to make sure I got here before you left. I left so quickly that I didn’t really get the chance to explain everything to my best friend.”

Tony abruptly remembered Bucky’s personal introduction. _ Hello, my name is Bucky, I like cool tech and my best friend Steve, and I had a dream that I would meet my soulmate here so I left home in the dead of night without telling anyone to get here as fast as possible. _

“So he’s been trying to call me non-stop since I left, but the one time I replied he tried to talk me out of waiting around here for you. He’s worried about me spending so much time where humans can see me. Which isn’t totally out of left field, of course, but I’m being careful enough this time. Besides, finding you was worth the risk.”

_ This time? _ Tony thought. Had Bucky ran into problems with humans before? Did those problems have anything to do with why he knew English?

He opened his mouth to ask, but Bucky plowed on with his explanation.

“He keeps trying to contact me, but he won’t listen to what I have to say! I found my  _ soulmate,  _ I can’t just ‘retreat to safety’ or whatever it is he wants me to do. Unfortunately, his messages kept lighting up, and the light shows gave me away when I hunted and scared off too much prey. So I’ve been keeping it up here on out rock where it’s safe and won’t light up.”

“How do you stop the seagulls from eating it?” Tony asked. It seemed like sea couldn’t move to get away would be like dinner served on a silver platter to the various sea birds that sometimes passed over the sun like a cloud.

“That was a problem in the beginning, when they first started spreading around, but the birds have learned better by now. The magnetic anemones are deadly poison to anything that tries to eat them. If a bird ate this, it would not live to see the sunrise on the next day.”

“Does it only work in water?”

Bucky nodded. “The anemones need water to change colors.” Suddenly, his smile turned sly again, and Tony tensed. 

“If you came into the water, I could show you! I’m sure he’s still trying to reach me. My friend is very stubborn. And if he isn’t calling me, I’ll send a message telling him I’m alright. That way you could see them glowing.”

It was the perfect Tony trap. Come into the water and I’ll show you cool mermaid biotech! If it weren’t for Bucky’s bright, toothy smile and writhing tentacles, he would have jumped right in. As it was he found himself inching closer to the water. 

What was he afraid of? He’d stopped being afraid that Bucky would use those teeth on him days ago. It was obvious that Bucky was too devoted to the idea of soulmates to do anything to harm him. Besides, he’d tended to Tony’s cuts not long ago. Nothing bad would happen to him if he got in the water.

However, he would be crossing a line of sorts. Up until now, he’d only gotten in the water with Bucky to get to and from their meeting rock. He’d never gotten into Bucky space at his behest. Bucky sometimes crossed over onto land, but he rarely stayed there long for fear of drying out. Tony could probably last in the water far longer than Bucky could last on land. He wasn’t quite sure why that was worrisome to him, but it was.

One the other hand, mermaid science! Bioengineered underwater cell phones that used magnetic fields and were created with a light-based language in mind! How could he possibly live with himself if he turned down this opportunity?

Slowly, like a glacier inching along, he moved further down the rock. Not quite into the water, but well within easy tentacle-reach. 

“Would I be able to see them glowing from up here?” He asked hesitantly. He was not sure what he wanted the answer to be. A small but insistent part of him had already decided to take his chances and get in the water, but the rational part of him was still at war with itself.

“I mean, maybe, but probably not.” Bucky replied. His tentacles wriggled a little bit closer to Tony, but didn’t touch. “Here, I can help you down.”

Tentatively he touched one of the tentacles. It curved slowly but sinuously around his palm like a snake. He felt the suckers on the bottom grip onto his hand and hoped they wouldn’t leave a mark. 

At the last moment he remembered to snag to cheap plastic face mask from his backpack. While he could open his eyes underwater, visibility wasn’t great when you were squinting against all the particles and debris in the water.

He half-walked half-slid down the rock onto the underwater ledge. Crouched like he was, the water didn’t quite come up to his shoulders. Bucky steadied him with his one human arm, and his tentacle remained tightly wrapped around him. Both were warm against his skin. 

The water was chilly, but he had just recently waded through it to get to the rock, so it wasn’t as bad as it could be. Within minutes he had adjusted to the temperature enough to go further out to the end of the ledge. 

He took a deep breath, then slipped off the edge and into the water.

Bucky’s tentacles held him and kept him from drifting away. The salt water streamed through his hair and over his pulsing throat. In fact, everywhere a major vein was near the surface- his wrists, his inner elbow, the bottoms of his feet- felt shocked and pulsing. Only Bucky felt warm.

He opened his eyes behind the plastic mask. 

Bucky hovered in front of him, anemone-encrusted rock in one twisting tentacle. Only unlike on land, where the creatures had been dull and lifeless, here under the water they lit up like christmas lights. The different creatures flashed in a variety of colors at far too great a speed for Tony to track. The anemones’ tentacles waved vigorously. 

He didn’t hear any humming, though perhaps it was just too low for him to detect. However, when Bucky had spoken on land, his humming had been clear as day. Maybe the communicators couldn’t transmit sound? Were the colors he’d seen even words like Bucky or his mysterious friend would speak with their tentacles, or was transmitted language different from colloquial language? Did the tentacle movement mean anything? 

His air ran out before his questions did, and he had to kick back up to the surface. Bucky surfaced with him, and helped guide him over to the shallow ledge so he could sit and adjust his face mask. 

“What does your friend have to say?” He asked.

Bucky’s tentacles twisted up in each other like thick knotted yarn. 

“He’s worried about me. He wants me to turn around and come home. The only reason he hasn’t showed up here to drag me back personally is that I didn’t tell him where I was going.”

Tony would have whistled if he wasn’t still trying to get his breath back.

“He’s not sold on the whole soulmate thing, huh?”

“Something like that,” Bucky said. “He thinks I’m in more danger here than I am.”

“Why does he think that? I mean, you already showed me how great you are at camouflage. I doubt any camera could find you if you didn’t want to be found.”

“Because he’s a worrier.” Bucky wrapped his tentacle a little tighter around Tony’s hand, which prompted Tony to realise that he didn’t really need to be steadied anymore. He didn’t shake off the tentacle just yet though. The texture of it was strange but pleasant in his hand.

* * *

Coding, which had already been a worthwhile diversion thus far, came easier and easier to him as he coded more and more games. Before long he found that he had to push the limits of the code to get the thrill of a challenge. During one of his recent research stunts at the library, he’d looked up the challenges the gaming industry was currently facing, and started tackling those.

He’d never put much thought into art before; Howard had made his disdain for the arts and humanities clear in private and had avoided talking about them in public. So animation was completely new to him. He had assumed that it would either be characteristically simple, as all things computer were to him, or insurmountably difficult. But gaming visuals were, according to his online research, getting better all the time, and if he was interested in where and how the industry was progressing, he’d need to bite the bullet and look into it.

It ended up being somewhere in between his two extreme expectations. While the actual artistic part of the endeavor was certainly not easy, there were lots of tutorials online, and he found that he actually seemed to do okay so long as he wasn’t animating people.

Art aside, the various software packages and animation programs were fascinating to take apart. They were constructed with all kinds of considerations in mind that he had never really given thought to before, like brush style. 

Animation had also naturally taken him to digital modeling, which was the stuff of dreams to him. He couldn’t help but chatter excitedly to Rhodey about it. Rhodey offered insights of his own, and before either of them knew it they had about six complex models and matching sets of red-rimmed raccoon eyes from gazing into their computer screens long into the night.

Bucky was either interested or forcing himself to be interested for Tony’s benefit. It was difficult for him to say definitively which it was. Either way, he always asked about Tony’s various coding projects and tried to help in any way he could. He was especially helpful when it came to the art side of animation, which made him the perfect partner for his current projects. Possibly due to his color-based first language, Bucky’s sense of color and motion were incredible. He was often confused with the layout or basis of the software Tony used to animate his games, though, which often slowed them down. If at all possible, Tony was going to try and hook up some mermaid tech to his computer so Bucky could work with him directly instead of resorting to pointing with his tentacles and trying to put the subtleties of art into English. 

Explaining things to Bucky surprisingly helped him learn the material better himself, so all in all he counted it as a win. Bucky asked so many questions about things Tony never would have thought of, and quick web searches revealed that no one else was asking questions like that on any of the forums Tony frequented. 

Bit by bit he mastered animation theory and began to push this limits of what could be done with graphics on a single computer or on a phone. His games started making more and more money, which was always good. Food cost money, and before too long he was going to have to find a laundromat and wash his clothes, or Rhodey was going to figure out that he was homeless. He panicked a little when one of his games got some coverage for how shockingly well it did in Norway, but the only outlets that really covered it were tech or gaming focused sources, so the story never really went anywhere. 

When he checked up on the Stark Heir Manhunt with adrenaline-shaking fingers, everyone was still up in the Canadian wilderness, and experts were starting to speculate about how long he could survive exposed to the elements. They had noticed the tent he’d taken and decided that he must plan on living away from civilization, probably to keep anyone from recognizing him. There was no sign that anyone had tracked the game back to him. 

He was still shaken, even though he knew he was still safe, so he set about creating a more solid online presence for the assumed identity he sold his games under. Edward Kubodera was a computer science enthusiast and self-taught programmer who was looking to make a little money off his hobby. That was all well and good, but this Edward Kubodera had no social media accounts, hadn’t graduated from any college or high school, wasn’t employed anywhere, and basically didn’t exist anywhere on the internet but on the page where he sold his games. 

He tried setting up some sock puppet social media, but right before making his first post he remembered that there were algorithms out there that could analyze someone’s writing style and match it back to a person. It was beyond paranoid, but all he could think was that Howard certainly had lots of writing samples of his. 

“Hey, what’s got you so tense?” Bucky asked. “Talking about science has never stressed you out before.” He looked faintly nauseated by the very idea that science talk could make his soulmate upset. Tony abruptly realised he’d been silent for too long, and their comfortable science conversation had died. 

“Could you do something for me?”

“Of course!” Bucky sat up straighter, like a dog looking at a tennis ball, all previous worry wiped from his face.

“I need to create an electronic trail for a fake identity. Could you type up some posts or something? Do whatever you want, so long as it can’t be tracked back to me.”

Bucky nodded gravely, and accepted Tony’s computer when he handed it to him like it was a holy relic. Tony crossed his fingers and hoped Bucky didn’t screw it up, and turned back to his phone. He still needed to troubleshoot a few features before he put a new game out.

* * *

It took him several days to realize that he had advanced beyond the current limits of the field, but once he did he realized that if he wanted to fulfill his half-formed ‘unknown scientist working in the field’ job aspirations, he should publish a paper on it or something. So after setting up his tent for the night he snuggled down into his sleeping bag and wrote something up on graphics coding, formatted it, added some diagrams and captions, then googled some credible journals to send it to.

It was around then that he realized he couldn’t publish it under his real name. For starters, he wasn’t a real, accredited scientist, nor was he affiliated with any credible institution. For another, there was still a huge manhunt looking for any sign of him. If he published a scientific paper, news was bound to reach his father. 

But he couldn’t just make up a name, someone was bound to check! He needed a name with some sort of authority behind it, a name that couldn’t be traced back to him but could be traced back  _ somewhere. _

Then it hit him. He had unknowingly constructed the perfect fake persona already! He’d published and sold his games under a fake name since the beginning. If anyone decided to look him up, they would find his games and see that he’d at least done some work in the field. It wasn’t a university profile or anything, but it was better than nothing. 

“Who knows?” he muttered as he pressed send. “Maybe it’ll even bring a little more traffic to my games. I could use the money.”

He closed his computer and stuck it back into his backpack, then did the same with his phone so he wouldn’t be tempted to check his notifications to see if the journal he’d sent the article to had responded. Or worse, if someone had traced the article back to him and brought Howard down on his head. He couldn’t expect to hear anything before tomorrow morning anyway.

He squirmed further down in his sleeping bag in search of a slightly more comfy spot on the ground. He briefly wondered if Bucky’s idea about moving out to their meeting rock was a good idea. It was big enough to support a few trees and shrubs, and had some flat rocks and mossy spots. Not having to constantly set up and tear down his tent was very tempting. 

Then he remembered Bucky’s sharp teeth and over-the-top devotion to Tony-his-soulmate, and decided that his current situation wasn’t too much trouble. Better to waste his time on his tent than to worry if Bucky would invade his tent in the night or something. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and reviews are greatly appreciated!


	3. Australian Giant Cuttlefish

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took so long! I didn't have internet for about a month, and had to write most of this by hand and transcribe it, and then I had trouble fitting the Rhodey and Bucky sections together, and generally organizing everything in a way that made sense. I intended to introduce Steve in this one, but he's going to have to wait for the next chapter.

The first thing Bucky said when Tony came out to their rock that night was “Do you want to go for a swim?”

Tony took a look at his slowly waving tentacles, his sharp teeth, and a voice in the back of his head said  _ this could be a bad idea. _ But that voice was sounding less and less convinced these days. Bucky had had plenty of good opportunities to attack or overpower Tony since their heart-pounding first meeting. Besides, he’d already gone into the water to look at the mermaid cell phone and watch it light up as Bucky’s buddy kept trying to call him. Which, yeah, he should probably encourage Bucky to actually pick up pretty soon. His friend must be really worried. 

Or maybe he should wait on that one. He didn’t know much about Bucky’s mermaid peers, aside from the fact that he had this one frantic friend. Tony certainly wouldn’t have wanted Bucky encouraging him to call his parents. Perhaps asking about his friends and family would be a better place to start.

Tony jerked his thoughts back to the question at hand- should he go swimming with Bucky?- and realized that he’d already decided to do it. He had plenty of arguments either way, but underneath that he was already planning what to talk about during their swim. 

“Sure. Anyplace in particular you want to go?”

Bucky shook his head. “Anywhere’s fine.”

Tony eyed his muscled torso. It might just be him, but he thought Bucky’s ribs were a little more clearly defined than before. 

“How long of a swim would it have to be for us to leave the bay?”

“Pretty long, since you probably won’t be able to swim as fast as me,” Bucky replied. His eyes gleamed with excitement. “But if you don’t have a place to be tonight, there’s a spot just outside and to the south that I think you’d like. And if you get tired, I can carry you! It’ll be great!”

“Sure, sounds good.” And while they were out there, maybe Bucky could  _ eat. _

He slipped gingerly off the ledge and into the waist-deep water.

Almost immediately Bucky was right up next to him, smiling big and excited. The last few rays of sunlight bounced off the water and gave his sharp teeth a reddish tinge. Tony felt one of his tentacles slide against his leg. 

“You might want to back up a bit,” he said. “I might accidentally kick you or get tangled or something.”

“Right, you swim by kicking,” Bucky lightly tapped his forehead, a gesture he’d picked up from Tony. “My bad.”

He quickly sank beneath the water so that his tentacles fell below Tony’s gently kicking feet. His tentacles drew together in unison and then pushed outwards like flower petals blooming. Tony felt a stream of water rush across his legs where the tentacle had been moments ago. He resurfaced a little more than a body length away. 

“Is this good?”

“You don’t have to go quite that far, but about like that.”

Bucky nodded and swam a few feet closer. Once he had found a good distance to avoid accidentally tangling Tony’s legs in his tentacles or getting kicked, they set out. 

The water wasn’t quite as warm as it was during the day under the full force of the sun, which wasn’t all that warm to begin with, but Tony had gotten used to the cool temperatures since coming to California. Though he still thought it was a special kind of nonsense that California water was colder than New York water. 

At a couple of spots, the bay was shallow enough for Tony to touch the bottom, but he managed to swim most of the way. He was noticeably slower than Bucky, but he thought he was holding his own, until towards the end Bucky wrapped a tentacle lightly around his waist and pulled him a little bit closer. 

“I think kick-swimming is tiring you out too fast. You need to make sure you have enough energy to swim back.”

Tony peered through the darkness at the tentacle clinging to his skin, and then down into the water, trying to get a look at his other ones. 

“Won’t that mess with your ability to swim?”

Bucky shrugged. 

“Not too much. I don’t kick-swim like you, I propel myself. It’s a lot less tiring. I only really have to move one syphon. You, on the other hand, have to move all four of your limbs, and utilize so many different muscles! That kind of swimming tires you out.”

His voice was warm and fond, like Tony was some sort of cute puppy learning how to dog paddle for the first time. Which, okay, maybe it seemed that way from Bucky’s point of view. He swam all day, every day. Tony’s efforts probably seemed cute to him. 

After a second’s pause, he ran through Bucky’s last sentence one more time.

“Wait, you’re not using your tentacles to swim?” He sort of had a mental model of Bucky that was human on top and octopus on bottom, and octopuses, like other cephalopods, used a siphon to jet propel themselves around. But that siphon was around the eyes on the diagrams he’d seen, so he’d sort of thought Bucky wouldn’t have it. Guess he was wrong. 

“Well, maybe a bit to steer, but not to move forward. My tentacle isn’t like your foot. It’s not very good at kicking. Better for holding.”

Tony felt the tentacle currently wrapped around him tighten a little for emphasis. He could feel the little suckers sticking fast to his skin. The skin of the tentacle was warm and soft, like silk. He kind of wanted to stroke it. He was pretty sure that if he started up where the tentacle met human skin, he could run his finger down the slippery skin without any resistance all the way to the tip. He was more than sure that Bucky would let him. 

He made a mental note to try that sometime soon. 

Letting Bucky carry him was peaceful. He could lay face-up and stare up at the night sky and watch as the stars started to come out. He could judge time by the regular pulses of water from Bucky’s siphon that flowed over his skin like a wind in the water. The tentacle wrapped around him stayed taut enough to support him in his lackadaisical float, so he didn’t even have to worry about maintaining his form to stay on the surface. 

“How much farther to this spot of yours?” He asked. The water around his ears made his voice sounded weird. 

“A little further. We might want to save it for another time, though. It may have been a bit further away than I imagined. We’re still not outside the bay yet.”

Tony hummed and relaxed back into the tentacle supporting his body.

Eventually, the rhythm broke as they rounded the corner of the bay and entered the shallows of the ocean proper. As close to land as they were, there wasn’t much of a difference, but it felt different to Tony. He always felt safe swimming in the bay. Even if the actual depth, composition and contents of the water around him hadn’t changed, he felt more exposed in the open ocean. Which was silly. He knew it was silly. 

He wasn’t even afraid of anything, really. The chances of anything attacking them was astronomically small, and there weren’t any currents worth being wary of this close to shore. A few deep breaths and he would get past this- this tension in his chest. 

Bucky swam them a little closer to shore, just enough that when the tentacle released Tony, he could touch the bottom. He looked out for the first time on the open ocean, and realized that this was the first time he’d seen it in real life, unobstructed and endlessly stretched out from his feet to the horizon and beyond. It looked deep and dark.

He turned and focused on Bucky instead. The way his tentacles undulated like dancing snakes in the water was mesmerizing and familiar, and his pale torso nearly glowed in the dark water. 

Seeing it reminded him all at once that he was supposed to encourage Bucky to eat while they were out here.

“Hey, Bucky,” Tony started, but Bucky cut him off.

“Don’t worry, Tony. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you. Whatever it is you’re afraid of, I can fight it off should it appear.”

Tony was positive he hadn’t mentioned his unease at leaving the relatively protected bay.

“What are you talking about?”

“I felt your heartbeat pick up just a few minutes ago, through the tentacle around your chest. Your heartbeat was steady and calm before we left the bay, but then it suddenly got faster. You didn’t say anything, but I know you’re scared of something. Well, whatever it is, I’ll protect you from it!”

Tony half-swam, half-walked over to Bucky and wrapped his hand around one of his writhing tentacles. 

“I’m fine. This is just the first time I’ve really seen or been in the open ocean. The first time I went to the beach was less than a month ago. I know that technically I’ve been wading through the ocean every day to come see you, but it just never felt like a big deal because the bay is so protected. Give it a little time and my heart will slow down on it’s own.”

Bucky nodded slowly. “Okay, that’s. That’s odd to think about. How have you never seen the ocean before?”

“Well, Stark Mansion is in upstate New York, firmly away from the water. Stark Industries is in Manhattan, and there’s so many skyscrapers that you rarely even see the water except from the air or one of the really crowded beaches. Boarding school was also inland, and Dad never took me anywhere because he was always working, and Mom never took me anywhere because if she did she might have to be a parent.”

Tony realized after he was done talking that Bucky might not know anything about New York or Manhattan. 

“So ‘inland’ is far enough onto the land that you can’t get to the water?” Bucky asked. “Just how long is the land?”

“It’s. Well, it’s. I don’t really know how to answer that.” Tony rubbed his chin. “We don’t usually talk about how long continents are. How about I pull up some maps when I go to the library next and show you?”

“Okay.” Bucky looked lost in thought. “I knew some land was longer than others, but I guess I never thought it was long enough that you could get away from the ocean.”

His head suddenly shot up.

“Does this mean that you’ve never been out of sight of land?!”

“Yes?”

Bucky’s eyes widened until there was so much sclera showing that they practically glowed. He looked like he’d been electrocuted. The tentacle in Tony’s hand wrapped itself several times around his wrist and forearm and the suckers on the bottom latched onto him. 

Now Bucky was the one who looked frightened and Tony was the one stuck trying to figure out how to calm him down. And just like Bucky, he had no idea what the problem was. 

“Hey, Bucky, can you talk to me? You’re holding my arm pretty tight. I think you’re going to leave a mark if you don’t let up on those suckers a bit.”

The merman nodded and breathed deeply, but didn’t say anything. He did slowly release his suckers, though, which was a start. In the dark Tony couldn’t tell if they’d left a mark or not, but the way his chest was heaving seemed less like hyperventilating with each passing heartbeat. 

“Sorry. Is your hand okay?”

“Feels fine now,” Tony said cautiously. “Want to move on from this for now and talk about something completely unrelated?”

He knew he sometimes didn’t like talking about things that upset him, especially when he was stressed, so maybe Bucky would respond well to space too. Conversational space, at least. 

Bucky nodded.

“Okay, how about food?” Tony tried. “Now that we’re out of the bay, we’ve probably left the areas you’ve been overhunting.”

Bucky’s stomach growled, but he looked dead set on ignoring it. 

“What about you? You can’t eat raw seafood, can you?”

“No, but I’m not starving either.”

Bucky looked like the very idea of eating while Tony couldn't was appalling to him. 

“Hey hey hey, no worries,” he said, cutting off whatever argument Bucky was going to make, hands half-raised and placating. “I ate before coming out here.” Which reminded him that he'd have to find some way to thank Rhodey for letting him use the field lab kitchen after he’d stayed late. Cooking over a fire was just harder all around than cooking in a kitchen. “I'm just fine on food. But was the last time you ate?”

Bucky crossed a tentacle over his one arm stubbornly, like he was prepared to listen to and summarily dismiss any invitation Tony gave for him to eat.

“I can't just pig out in front of you without so much as offering you a portion of my kill.”

“Not even if I want you to?” Tony asked in what he hoped was a more of an argumentative tone than an upset one. 

There it was again- the whole soulmates thing. For all that Bucky had learned to avoid outright proclaiming that fate had brought them together and so they would live together and be happy forever, he still treated Tony like he thought some abstract concept of a soulmate should be treated. 

He was abruptly glad that it was so dark out. He could feel the wetness gathering traitorously around the corners of his eyes and the heat rising in his cheeks, but it was invisible to anyone else. So long as he didn't speak until he'd regained control of himself, no one need know how strongly and stupidly he was reacting to this whole thing. 

“Why would you want that though?” Bucky asked. “It's a privilege to be hunted for, and you deserve every privilege I can offer you, especially considering how this whole thing has gone.”

“What do you mean, ‘considering how this whole thing has gone?’”

Bucky’s tentacles jerked about in the water frustratedly. 

“Well,” he replied in a weak, airy voice, “I know you're not too keen on being my soulmate, and that you weren't expecting it when I showed up with your name on my arm.” He rubbed one tentacle over the spot where Tony's name was printed. “The least I can do is try to be a good soulmate to you, try and prove myself to you.”

“I don't know how well you've gotten to know me,” Tony broke in, “but it's not you I object to. Why would I? You're amazing, and you talk to me about science, the shortcut to my heart. The part I object to is the part where I don't get to have an opinion. I don't like hearing that fate has already decided what I'm doing with my life, I don't like knowing that you're only here because a mark on your arm told you to, and I don't like watching you get thinner and thinner every day. I can only do something about one of those things, so I'm trying to focus on that.  _ Eat _ .” 

Bucky still didn't seem convinced, so Tony racked his brains for something else to say to convince him. 

“What about this. What if you eat now, tonight, and tomorrow you bring me some crab? I can cook that pretty easily, even if I only have a fire to work with. It'll mean I won't have to pay for food for dinner, so it'll be doubly helpful. Will that appease your sense of duty?”

Bucky nodded. “Alright. If you're sure.”

“I'm very sure. Now eat before your ribs tries to poke through your skin, they look like they're planning a violent escape.”

Bucky smiled so that the moonlight caught his teeth, then disappeared under the water with a splash. 

Tony tentatively followed him. His initial skittishness at the sight of the open ocean faded to a muted sort of caution as he slowly kicked away from shore. Bucky was around here somewhere. If something happened, he would be on him immediately. He repeated that sentiment in his head like a prayer, as though the sentiment alone would repel any dangers waiting in the dark water. Slowly, the tranquility he’d felt on the way out of the bay descended over his body again like a thin layer of glass between him and the world.

That feeling was quickly shattered by something half-brushing half-wrapping around his calf. 

He jerked his leg back as though from a striking viper and practically threw himself backwards. It felt strong yet conical, and quite smooth, like a snake. Oh god, there were eels in California, weren’t there? Whatever it was, it was almost definitely a better swimmer than he was, he had to get to the shallows  _ now _ or he’d never be able to get away. He splashed and thrashed away like a drowning cat.

Then his higher brain functions caught up with his lizard brain. That hadn’t felt like a creature. That had felt like kelp. Which it probably was. There was a minor kelp forest right outside the bay. He’d seen it on one of those maps geared towards summertime tourists sprinkled around the waterfront. Nothing was after him. 

Of course Bucky chose that moment to seize him in a five-tentacle death grip and burst out of the water like some sort of sea demon. 

“What was it, Tony? I’ve got you, just point me at it!”

Tony wilted in his tentacles in embarrassment. 

“It’s okay, I was just startled.” He muttered.

Bucky wrapped another tentacle around him. “Then what startled you? I’ll scare it away, and then it won’t trouble you anymore.”

“I doubt you can scare away the kelp.” His blush was back with a vengeance.

“The kelp?” Bucky asked. “What’s so scary about the kelp?”

“Well, you know how when something brushes your leg- or, I guess your tentacle?- and for a split second you’re convinced it was a monster, and then you remember that monsters aren’t real so it’s probably a snake or something, and then that’s even worse because snakes can move faster than you can?

“I don’t think I know quite what you’re talking about, but it sounds frightening,” Bucky said. “Also, what’s a snake?”

“They’re a kind of animal that lives on land for the most part, though I think some of them can swim. Sort of like a land eel?”

Bucky lay one tentacle along the length of his arm and undulated it gently, like he was stroking him. “Eels can be very nasty, and pretty fast. It is never fun to face one.” He paused. “But they’re not the quickest predator out there, and they’re simple enough to escape usually. Well, less so for octopuses and squid without torsos or faces like me, but you understand. They don’t like to leave they’re little caves, so they leave themselves exposed to my teeth, and I can bite them in half. Sometimes you end up having to deal with poison, but the antidotes are pretty easy to get a hold of. If they mangle one of my tentacles beyond repair, or just won’t release it, I can always cut it off and escape that way. It’s a pain to regrow them, though. Are they worse on land?”

_ “You can cut off you’re tentacles and then regrow them!?” _ Tony hissed. “Jesus Christ.” He ran his hand reverently over the tentacle around his waist. “You mean you could just abandon this whole limb right now, no problem? Wow. Please tell me mermaids have tattoos. If you got bored, you could just ditch the whole thing and start all over again!”

Bucky shrugged against Tony’s back. “I guess you could, but I don’t know anyone who would want to go through the trouble. It takes a lot of energy to grow them back.”

Tony’s brow furrowed, and he leaned back against Bucky’s chest a little more firmly.

“Hold on, if you can regrow limbs, why hasn’t your human arm grown back? Does it just take a really long time? Can you only regrow tentacles, not arms?”

Bucky flinched. “That’s a unique situation.  _ Normally _ it would grow back.” His voice was wistful for a second, then he abruptly changed the subject. 

“So, snakes. You sound like they’re worse than eels, but how?”

“Well first off, you can never tell which direction those fuckers are going to move at any given moment, which is the freakiest shit. Though, to be perfectly honest, that would be a cool design feature. If I ever end up in robotics I am definitely going to use that, I hear nature doesn’t care if you plagiarize her ideas…”

As he talked, Bucky guided him carefully back towards the bay. By the time they reached the island, Tony’s ramblings had moved from snakes to the robots he would theoretically make if he had a lab of his own, to everything wrong with the field of robotics, to space travel and all the cool ideas for it that those magnetic field-based communicators had given him, to updates on his sock puppet game developer/computer scientist Edward Kubodera, to how great it would be if Bucky could swim through the the kelp forest sometime with a camera that he’d modified one night when he was having trouble sleeping. 

“I just can’t animate fast enough to get this idea off the ground even  _ with  _ your help on the art, but if I had video I think I could write something to convert the images. Then I could work from a functional video base, which would mean a lot less time until it was ready for release. Also, try and eat while you’re out there. You can’t possibly have managed to eat enough, we were barely out there for ten minutes.”

“I’ll make sure and bring you back some too. You can show me how you convert it to animation after we eat. Not that I don’t think you can, I just want to see  _ how _ you do it.” Bucky lifted him up onto their little island and set him down next to his backpack. 

“You mean you want to gaze at my face like a puppy staring at a treat,” Tony laughed.

Bucky shrugged. “You make cute faces when you’re playing with science.”

“What can I do, it’s science. I can’t concentrate on less important things like  _ composure _ when there’s science to be done!”

Bucky smiled fondly. “Of course you can’t.”

* * *

 

When Tony walked into the lab to meet up with Rhodey the next day, he was met with chaos and tears. Wires, pieces of autopsied drone, and stacks of paper radiated outwards from the central focal point, where Rhodey sat with his laptop in stoic distress. He didn’t even seem to notice that he was crying. 

Tony gingerly tiptoed over to his side, doing his best not to step on anything important.

“Platypus, honeybear, what’s the matter?”

“The camera wobbles.” Rhodey said. His voice was calm and easy, like he was just having a minor issue finding the leftovers he’d put in the fridge. If Tony hadn’t been able to see the tears streaming down his cheeks, he would have thought nothing was wrong.

“Okay, do you know why the camera wobbles?” He asked hesitantly.

“No. I just can’t seem to figure it out. I’ve tightened everything, and I’ve tried jiggling it to see if I can find the problem manually, but everything seems fine. Look.” He reached over to a gutted drone and pinched what Tony guessed was the camera between his fingers and tried to shake it. Nothing happened. 

“And yet, when I send it up, the camera wobbles. I can’t hand this in, Tony. What use is a data-gathering drone if it can’t gather data? Professor Zhang will take one look at this and throw me out of her class for wasting her time. This is just the first stage of the project, too. Isn’t step one supposed to be the easy part?” 

Not once did Rhodey’s voice ever break or stray away from casual tones. Tony suppressed a shiver. He needed to do something about this, fast. He was pretty sure this was what a mental breakdown looked like.

“Okay,” He said, trying to cover up his rising panic. He didn’t know how to comfort people, what if he made things worse? “Is the camera supposed to be fixed, or is it supposed to move?”

“It’s supposed to move, but it’s supposed to move with purpose. It’s not supposed to wobble.”

Tony wondered if this was what he looked like when he was twenty-five hours into a project and butting up against a stumbling block. If so, it was no wonder his mom never came down to see him work or asked about his projects. He probably wasn’t nearly so controlled as Rhodey. He’d have to ask him later how he learned to make his voice sound normal, that was a neat trick.

“Why is it supposed to move?”

“It’s supposed to track certain kinds of motion. So like, if a dog was running in the frame, the camera would follow the dog.”

“I see.” Tony sank down in a clear spot near Rhodey. He carefully avoided knocking over any of the precarious piles of papers. “You’re absolutely sure nothing’s loose? Even if the part the camera’s mounted on is stable, that part could be attached to something else that isn’t.”

“I’m sure,” Rhodey said. “I went back and reattached everything to make sure each piece was tight, but it still wobbled. I’ve taken the damn thing apart so many times I could probably put it back together in my sleep. And before you ask, I already checked all of the wiring. Nothing electrical is wrong with it.”

Tony wondered if this was what mental breakdown looked like. He’d heard they were a thing for college students.

“Okay then, if the hardware’s fine then what about the software? Are you running any sort of programs on this thing, anything like that?” He hoped that his fumbling didn’t tip his friend over the line from calm crying to hysterical crying. His mother was hysterical all the time, and he’d never once managed to get through to her like that. 

Rhodey pointed mutely at the computer in front of him. Tony peered over his shoulder, and winced at the number of error messages. 

“Okay, that’s a lost cause. Let’s shut it down, then look at it again without all that clutter.”

Rhodey methodically cleared each message, then shut down the program, which didn’t want to shut down. His expression grew even more resigned, and he began the force-quit process. Tony tried to force down his sympathy panic. 

“Hey, have you, like, slept recently?” He asked. “Or eaten anything?”

“Sleep is for the weak,” Rhodey said with practiced speed and cadence, like a chant.

“Rhodey-bear, honey, that’s my line, you can’t take it. Now how can you get on my case about my seventy-hour programming binges if you’re not awake and aware enough to be responsible?” 

“I swear to god, Tony, if you’re serious about that number of hours I won’t ask you to be my actual scientist partner for the second part of the project.”

“Actual science partner? Platypus, you’ve piqued my interest, you’ll have to tell me all about it after you take a half-hour nap. Don’t worry, I’ll reboot everything and deal with all those pesky details while you rest, and I promise to wake you. Now, chop chop! The faster you close those eyes, the faster you can wake up again and get back to work!”

Tony carefully guided a protesting Rhodey onto a clear space between spokes of paper, then set about setting up the program again. Snores began coming from the vicinity of his leg less than a minute later. He smiled fondly, then set a timer for half an hour. 

Once he was sure Rhodey was asleep, he got up and slunk over to the lab kitchenette. As quietly as he could, he opened up his backpack and began unclipping the water bottles from the back strap. He carefully unscrewed the tops, filled them up with water from the sink, replaced the tops, and clipped them back onto the strap. The last two he set in the mesh pockets on the side of the backpack. Then he snuck back over to where Rhodey lay, dead asleep. A couple of times he almost tripped over a drone part, but each time he managed to wildly windmill his arms enough to avoid face planting in the paper stacks. 

He checked the computer screen; the program had rebooted nicely, and he still had ten minutes on his timer before Rhodey’s half-hour was up. So far, so good. 

He ran his eyes down the code, and didn’t see any glaring errors. Everything seemed to be in order. Rhodey’s code was very neat, with clear commenting and sensible formating that made it easy to figure out what each piece of it did. He was impressed. 

He carefully pressed a button on the bottom of the camera, which had been sitting next to a stack of papers with a sticky note on top that read  **Prof. Zhang’s comments, read and respond** . The camera gave a little beep, and a little red light lit up. The computer gave an answering beep. The program accepted the camera easily, and a window opened automatically on the left side of the screen. Data began to appear in the window on little graphs with color-coded lines and customizable axes. So that part at least was working. 

In another window, his timer went off. He had the volume turned down, but Rhodey still jerked out of his slumber like a surprised cat. 

“Easy there, you’re okay. Your catnap’s over, and I’m sure you’re refreshed and ready to rock and roll. I restarted the program and looked it over, and so far everything seems to be in order. Your code is amazing, by the way, so clear and pretty to look at. They should use your code as examples for textbooks. Tell me, how do you avoid churning out incomprehensible paragraphs of overly compressed nonsense that looks like a cat walked across the keyboard, inquiring minds want to know. I’ve tried to write nice code like that, let me tell you, and without exception I’ve been told that I’ve churned out some sort of terrifying maze.”

His babble seemed to calm Rhodey down a bit from his initial panic back to the sort of emotional limbo he’d been in before. Once he thought his friend had gotten his bearings again, he adjusted all of the program-related windows so that they could see everything at once.

“Let’s take a look at these loops, and if nothing’s wrong there then we’ll move on to the if/then bits, how about that? Those loops always look so innocent, but that’s always were trouble pops up.”

“I already did that,” Rhodey said. “I checked them over and over again, but I couldn’t find anything wrong, so I saved them in a text doc and replaced them with if/then statements. I’d just finished testing the new code when you got here. Even without any loops, the camera still jiggles.”

Tony was pretty sure you were supposed to blink more often than Rhodey was. He was tempted to wave his hand in front of his face just to see if he reacted. Yeah, that catnap hadn’t been near enough. Unfortunately, Tony knew that desire to just finish, no matter how long it would take or how many obstacles he had to battle past. If Rhodey was anything like him, he wouldn’t sleep until he’d found the problem or until he involuntarily lost consciousness.

A strange thought floated through his head. He hadn’t been on a binge like this since running away from home. Without his lab, he’d gotten used to doing all of his science either here or from his laptop. He couldn’t stay here too long into the night, or Rhodey and the other students might get suspicious, and his laptop battery only lasted so long, so he simply hadn’t been able to yet.

He shook himself, and returned to the issue at hand. 

“I highly doubt you messed up the if/then bits if you’ve checked everything that many times, so how about the program input itself?”

Rhodey gave him a dead-eyed fish stare, then scrolled back up to the top of the code without even looking at the screen.

Slowly, they combed through the program. Tony let himself sink into the project until time began to flow strangely around him and he could no longer judge how much had passed. Rhodey guided him through the parts he’d already picked apart and helped him bypass the parts that didn’t have to do with the camera. 

Three hours after Tony’s arrival they finally hit on the answer. 

“Hey, Platypus, this part controls what the camera tracks, right?”

“It should be.”

“And it’s supposed to track specific motions, right?”

“That’s what Professor Zhang wants, right.”

“So it’s not supposed to track every possible motion type at once, right? Just one type?”

Rhodey stiffened like a dog that smelled something in the bushes, then practically dove for the keyboard. Tony sat back and let him mutter over the different motion conditions. With the end in sight, he finally felt the hours catch up to him. His head began to spin a bit, and if it weren’t for the drone parts strewn behind him he would have laid down. 

Suddenly, Rhodey gave a whoop and shook his shoulder aggressively. He pointed to the data window, where now there was just one graph. The two of them stared at that single graph for a few heartbeats, then pulled up the camera feed. Tony snatched the camera and began waving it slowly across the room like he was taking a panorama.

“No wobble!” Rhodey crowed. “Thank god, no wobble!”

Then, like a puppy that had abruptly run out of energy, he collapsed sideways and knocked over a stack of papers labeled  **programming cheat sheets.**

Tony gingerly pushed his head off of the papers and tried to throw them back into what might pass for a neat pile, then cleared a path through the room so he could drag Rhodey to bed. 

Rhodey was heavy, and absolutely no help when they came to a corner that needed clearing. Thankfully, they bumped into Bruce halfway down the hall, who helped finish dragging his labmate into bed. He even knew were they kept the extra blankets so Tony could tuck him in properly before leaving. 

When he stepped out of the lab, a wave of sleepiness crashed into him and nearly knocked him off his feet. It was only midday, but the only thing he wanted to do was go set up his tent by the campgrounds and take a nap as soon as physically possible. 

* * *

The pitter-patter of rain hitting his tent slowly roused Tony from his slumber that afternoon. It was a comforting, pleasant sound, in an it’s-cold-and-wet-out-there-and-warm-in-here sort of way, but he wasn’t in a position to enjoy it. He had slept with his face near the tent flap and as soon as be regained consciousness he realized that his face was cold. He burrowed down into his sleeping bag, but that movement started waking up the rest of his body. He tried as best he could to lay still and go back to sleep, but after twenty minutes of trying to no avail, he had to admit that he wasn’t going back to sleep.

He braced himself, then stuck his head and shoulders back out of the warm cocoon of his sleeping bag. The temperature change triggered something in his brain, and he began to wake up properly. 

The first thing he did was grab his computer and check up on his finances. He'd launched a new game last night, hoping that he could make enough money for a pot. Up until now he'd been living off food that didn't need to be cooked, but he'd had sandwiches every day for at least a week now, and he wanted to try some actual cooking. 

He pulled up his account information, then took a look at the numbers. His eyes scanned lazily over the numbers, then darted back to the top several seconds to confirm what they’d seen. His eyebrows rose. Those numbers were bigger than he’d thought they’d be. That was good and all, but how had it happened? His games had never made so much money so quickly in the past. 

His fingers trembled gently as he googled the name of his game. 

**Hit New Game Uses Off-The-Charts Animation, Prompts Search for Developer** , the first headline read. He clicked on it.

_ Everyone from gamers to commuters with time to kill are talking about  _ _ Kelp Maze _ _ , a game available at the  _ _ App Store _ _ that began trending mere hours after its release. The game was produced and developed by  _ _ Edward Kubodera _ _ , a relatively new name in the industry who has been gaining a following over the past couple of weeks since they started releasing games.  _

_ “The animation is just so pretty,” says long-time gamer Ellie Wu, who was among the first to purchase the game. “It blew me away when I first saw it. The colors are fabulous, but it’s more than just that. Everything moves exactly like it would in real life. I had to check and make sure it wasn’t video or something.” _

_ Wu isn’t alone in her appreciation of the animation quality. App developer Pedro Veracruz, along with just about every other game graphics specialist out there, was impressed but befuddled by the quality of the Kelp Maze’s graphics.  _

_ “This game must have been in development for a long time, which is very strange considering the history of Mr. Kubodera, the man behind this game and a handful of others that have been recently released. Mr. Kubodera’s info page claims that he is a self-taught hobby programmer, and this is backed up by the noticeable difference in quality between his first game and his more recent ones. This latest game, however, would have required more time for a professional to make than Kubodera has been on the platform. It just doesn’t make any sense.” _

_ Kubodera’s games have enjoyed success in Norway, as well as moderate success elsewhere in Europe, but Kelp Maze has truly taken off on a global scale. It has made hundreds of dollars in the past twelve hours, and has brought publicity to  _ _ #FindKubodera _ _ , a hashtag which started last week in Norway after Nils Larsen, the CEO of  _ _ Kulelyn Games _ _ , tweeted about his desire to find out more about the man behind the games.  _

Tony slammed his computer shut and thrust it back into his backpack. His heart pounded hard enough for him to feel in his ears and his neck as he slowly wriggled back into his sleeping bag. 

What he needed to do was not go binge-reading every news article about this, not to go on twitter and read through that hashtag, and definitely not to panic. This wasn’t the end of the world. No one was making any sort of connection between Kubodera and Tony Stark, missing teenager. There were a lot of people in the world, and as far as anyone else was concerned, Edward Kubodera could have been any of them. 

But it wouldn’t stay that way forever. People were asking about him. A gaming CEO was actively looking for him via twitter. The article didn’t seem like front-page news, but it didn’t need to be to pique the interest of someone persistent enough to be a problem. He needed to do something to put out this fire, and he needed to do it without losing the cash flow that the games had provided him with. 

He needed to think about something else. Anything, so long as it distracted him his terror. Like what he should do with the extra money! That was a simple, judgement-based problem that he could solve. Would it be a bad idea to try and buy an identity for Edward Kubodera so any nosy person who tried to look him up wouldn’t discover that there were no records of anyone with that name?

He glanced around at his messy tent, him on one side and his overflowing backpack on the other, and sighed. No, he had more important things to spend money on. He needed food and materials more than he needed a solid cover story for his sock puppet programmer. 

Food was pretty straightforward, but if he was going to get materials, he needed to know what his goal would be. 

Despite the light chill in the early morning air, a spark of warmth flickered to life in his chest. His eyes flickered over to the modified dive mask sitting next to his backpack, and the spark turned into a pulsing glow. His first inventing project to make use of what little he’d learned of mermaid technology had done remarkably well. He hadn’t tested it on longer swims yet, but he had stuck his face in water to see if it worked. He was planning on going swimming with it later today and seeing if he could surprise Bucky. 

It made something within him shiver in pleasure to know that he’d made something with technology no other human being knew about, and that what he’d made had been for  _ him. _ Not a weapon his father could sell, not a publicity stunt to show off what a genius he was and what an asset he’d be to the company in the future, just something that  _ he’d _ wanted to make.

He wanted to do that again. 

Perhaps he could make something to do with food? He wasn’t sure how he’d go about making a refrigerator that fit in his backpack- even if he completely reimagined it technologically from the ground up, it would still need space for him to put the food in- but what about something to do with heat? He’d be a lot less limited in the food he could buy if he could actually cook what he bought. Maybe a sort of modified stove?

But a stove brought its own set of issues. Namely, the fact that aside from a swiss army knife, a spoon and a fork, he hadn’t brought any dishes or kitchenware when he’d left home. He just hadn’t thought beyond ‘hey, I don’t need to waste space on plates, I can eat off a rock with my hands!’ He still hadn’t dared to light a fire since he didn’t have anything to cook the food in, so he needed to get his hands on a pan or a coffee pot or something. 

So perhaps inventing a collapsible, space-efficient stove would have to wait until he’d at least got himself a pot. That was on his to-buy list anyway since he’d suggested Bucky bring him seafood. Whatever Bucky brought he was going to have to cook. 

Alright then: food, a pot, and supplies to make a Tony Stark Original stove if there was money left over. He was okay for water for tonight after filling up all those water bottles at the lab. He’d been hesitant to bring so many with him when he’d left home, but he was thanking his lucky stars now. 

He slowly pulled himself out of his sleeping bag and began the process of packing up. He could go buy a pot and maybe a few other things before meeting Bucky for dinner and still have time to go check on Rhodey, but not if he fell asleep again. He felt like making sure his friend wasn’t still doing that creepy emotionless panic-thing was a pretty important thing to make time for. 

* * *

 

Rhodey seemed mostly okay when he returned to the field lab. He’d taken another nap, and was now making cookie dough in the lab kitchen. He insisted that actual cookies were too much work, and that the recipe he was using was edible without baking, otherwise Tony would have tried to take another nap on his couch. He was almost finished, so Tony was waiting at the counter. To pass the time, he ran a quick Google Search on computer science news. 

When he saw the results, he nearly had a heart attack.

Real, respected scientists were citing his papers left and right. Scientific journals were sending inquiries about new work he might like to publish. His most recent game was trending at #9 in the App Store, and people were writing articles about his animation coding. A tech journalist wanted a quote for a book she was writing on how the gaming industry was becoming an important force in several computer science-based fields. 

He was famous. Well, science-famous, so it wasn't like the nightly news was running a story on Tony's fake scientist, but it didn't need to be that bad to make him want to sink into the center of the earth. It was one thing for people to be talking about his games, which his father had no time for, but it was quite another for people his father went to conferences with to be talking about his work!

It would be all too easy for Howard, or really anyone at Stark Industries, to start asking questions about Kubodera, and even easier for them to realize he didn't exist. It wasn't like he could show up for any conferences or agree to collaborate without getting caught out. 

He pulled up the article he'd published that morning. Already it had gotten quite a bit of traffic. Part of him wanted to feel upset about that, but another part wanted to crow in vindication. Howard had always been so sure to let Tony know that none of his ideas would hold up well under the attentions of the scientific world. 

Rhodey peered over his shoulder. 

“I know you're supposed to be some sort of whiz-kid, but are you seriously reading scientific papers for fun? Computer science isn't even your area, man!”

Tony hurriedly left the page. 

“Not entirely, I did minor in it. It's an exciting field. Besides, it's  _ connected _ to my area. Engineering and physics go hand in hand with computer science.” 

His mind raced. He needed to fix this, but how? What was the good outcome here? He couldn't just let Kubodera fade away- he needed the money the apps brought in, and he was gaining a following. It would be extremely inconvenient to build up that buyer base again. And in a way, the damage was already done. He had already drawn attention to himself, and someone would follow up eventually. His only real hope was to try and shore up what he already had. 

Deep down, he knew that those obstacles weren't insurmountable. He could start again. He just didn't want to. He’d gotten attached to his sock puppet scientist and didn't want to give him or his forays into computer science. 

“Alright man,” Rhodey continued, interrupting his frantic thoughts, “but don't come crying to me when you've developed a permanent squint from reading those things until three in the morning.”

Right. He could think about this later. For now, he had to pay attention to Rhodey. He couldn't afford to space out like this. 

“Wouldn't dream of it, platypus. Who said anything about three o’clock in the morning? I was just waiting for you. Now, what's the problem with that perfectly good drone you made that we got all dirty testing out? I thought we'd worked out all the kinks.”

Rhodey rolled his eyes. 

“Yeah, I thought so too, but this morning I got an email from Professor Zhang saying it needed to be able to go higher.”

“Is this the same hard-to-impress professor you were talking about earlier?”

Rhodey nodded. 

“Don't get me wrong, I am ecstatic to be working with her this summer, even remotely. The woman's smart as anyone you'll meet and a great teacher. She's just a little difficult to please. And this is kind of a big project, what with the outside scientists and all. Which, by the way, you’re going to be my outside scientist. You already spend so much time here, you might as well have something to do.” 

Tony nodded absently. “So you can't just turn in good, can you. It's gotta be better than just good.” Then the rest of what Rhodey said registered. “Wait, what? You want me to be your outside scientist?”

Shit. His lies were catching up to him. He didn’t have any credentials or papers or experience beyond his handful of games and papers. 

“Of course, man! You’re always helping me out, so I thought we might as well make it official.”

“Uh huh. Um, is there any paperwork I have to fill out?” He asked hesitantly. 

“Nah, I just have to let Professor Zhang know I’ve found someone.”

“Alrighty then. Um, how high did you get it to go last time?” 

Thankfully, Rhodey didn’t comment on how awkward that topic change was. 

“About a mile, I think. Here, I wrote it down somewhere, but definitely not more than a mile and a half.”

“Did she give you any indication of how high she wanted it to be able to go?” He asked. 

Calculations flew through his head like startled birds. They could probably make it go a little higher with the technology they had, but not much. Maybe that was the point, to force them to come up with something different. He wasn't entirely sure he could pull it off, but if he put his mind to it he could probably integrate some of the mermaid tech he'd seen. That communicator of Bucky's had worked using magnetic fields, right?

“No, nothing specific, just higher.” He paused and squinted at Tony. “Why do you ask?”

“So suspicious, Rhodey-bear,” Tony cooed distractedly as he pulled up a file on his computer labeled ‘It’s better down where it's wetter,’ where he kept his mermaid science observations, and selected the file labeled ‘magnetic coral.’ 

“Say, you wouldn't happen to have some nice magnets I could use, would you?”

“If I give them to you, will you explain what you're doing instead of mad scientist-laughing at me?”

“You drive a hard bargain, cupcake, but I accept your terms. Now, magnets! And let me have some of that cookie dough, you can’t possibly eat all of that by yourself!” He made obnoxious grabby-hands until Rhodey laughed and went to retrieve the magnets. 

…

It took four hours to get the magnetic fields to cooperate enough to get the drone in the air, but the cheer Rhodey gave when it finally rose off the ground and hovered in the field made the time spent worth it in Tony's eyes. 

“I still don’t know how this is working, man. If you’d have proposed this to me this morning, I would have told you that wasn’t how magnetic fields worked,” Rhodey said in awe. “I still don’t really get how you did that.”

Tony smirked. “Wanna go test it out tomorrow when we’ve got a bit more daylight to work with? I mean, it’s cool and all, but it’s not of much use to us if it doesn’t work, right?”

Rhodey shook his head and laughed.

“You are crazy. Sure, come over tomorrow and we’ll test it. Don’t ask me to explain to Professor Zhang how you managed it, though. I couldn’t follow all those crazy tangents you went on.”

“You’ll get it, trust me. It’s not as hard to figure out as you think it is. Now, you wouldn’t happen to have any more magnets, would you? Small ones, much smaller than these.”

“Be my guest and have a look. I’m gonna go get some sleep. See you tomorrow?”

“Thanks. Sure, I’ll be over. You can’t keep me away from this temple of science for long, Platypus.”

Tony mentally rubbed his hands together. If he could just get enough materials together for his collapsible stove idea, then he was set.

* * *

 

It took Tony a few tries to start up the stove, but once the burner caught it held a steady flame. He found himself hovering near its warmth, even though it was hardly a chilly night. It had taken him longer than he’d thought to assemble it, and he never would have managed it without the notes he kept on his science talks with Bucky, but it seemed to be working. He would consider this its test run, and if all went well tonight he’d call it a success.

The flame illuminated his makeshift kitchen, which simultaneously discouraged him with its crudeness and satisfied him with its very presence. He hadn't been sure that he could get everything he needed, and he was a little proud of having pulled it off. The water bottles he'd filled at the lab sat in a neat row a couple of paces away, and a flat piece of sun-bleached driftwood lay on the flattest part of the rock. It would be a sort of big, shared plate. He'd realized on his way out to his and Bucky's rock that he didn't have any plates or bowls, and the pot would have to cool down before they could safely eat out of it. 

He grabbed the first water bottle and poured its contents into the pot. He methodically worked through the line of bottles until it was sufficiently full, then put the top on.

“Why don't you just use seawater?” Bucky asked. 

Tony whipped around. 

“When did you get here?” He gasped. 

Bucky rose part way out of the water. The stove fire cast eerie shadows on his tentacles as they snaked up the rock. 

“Just now. Did I startle you?”

Tony waved him off, though his heart was still racing. 

“No harm done, I was just surprised. I'm a little jumpy these days.” 

The image of his parents on the news flashed through his mind. He pushed the image away, though he still felt the urge to glance around and make sure they weren't being watched. 

“I'm not using saltwater because I'm not sure if it's safe to eat something that's been cooked in seawater. Now would be a really bad time to get sick.”

Bucky crawled closer. 

“What has you so unsettled? Is there something I can do to help?”

Tony shrugged and cast about furiously for another topic. 

“How was the crabbing? Did you catch any?”

Bucky's concern melted off his face and was replaced with a glowing smile. He hoisted his remaining tentacles out of the water. Two tentacles clutched what looked like a plastic shopping bag made of rusty colored mesh. It gave easily against the rocks, so Tony guessed it was made of something flexible. It was visibly wriggling. 

Bucky deposited the bag next to the stove. 

“I did not know how many you would need, so I caught one for each tentacle in case my carrier broke and I had to carry them individually.”

“That's probably more than enough,” Tony assured him. “Thanks.”

Bucky beamed. 

“What else can I do to help you?” He asked eagerly. “I don't know how humans eat these things, but if you show me what to do I'll prepare them for you!”

“Well, there's not all that much to do. You could find me a good hard ridge to break the shells on though.”

Task so granted, the merman set about searching the nearby rocks for something serviceable. 

While Bucky was occupied, Tony inspected the carrier. It gave easily when he poked it, so it probably wasn't some sort of wire mesh, though up close it looked like some sort of weave. No metal was that malleable while still maintaining a defined shape. Whatever this was, it had more in common texturally with cloth or thin plastic, or even play-doh. 

“Will this work?” Bucky called from a few yards away. 

Tony reluctantly turned from the strange material and worked his way across the rocks to join him. 

The ridge of rock he found was a bit big but perfectly serviceable. Bucky retrieved the carrier for him and emptied it of its cargo. He carefully delegated one tentacle per crab, and held them primarily by the back end where the shell met the underbelly with his suction cups so that he wouldn't get pinched. Their claws scrambled and their claws pinched, but all they caught was air. 

Tony, unlike Bucky, was inexperienced at crab holding. When Bucky offered him the first crab, he didn't keep his fingers far enough out of range. The crab almost immediately reached down and clamped its claw on his finger like a mousetrap. 

He helped and tumbled backwards. Bucky cried in alarm and threw out a tentacle to catch him, then remembered that he still had a crab in that tentacle. He turned the tip of the tentacle away at the last moment, so he ended up trying to catch Tony with the middle of his tentacle instead of the end. 

The crab was still dangling from Tony's finger, adding its body weight to the pressure on his flesh. He gritted his teeth and curled his finger as best he could, trying to break its hold. With his other hand he tried to pry the lower half of the claw far enough off him to pull free. 

After bit of cursing and wriggling against Bucky's supporting tentacle, the claw gave and Tony was free. He dropped it onto the rock near his feet, where it began to advance on his toes, forcing him to try again. This time he clutched it in a more secure two-handed grip, with half of the legs and one claw held together in each hand like a bouquet of flowers. 

His finger still stung, but it didn't hurt as much now that the claw wasn't digging into the wound. It was bleeding a bit, but not too badly. 

Another tentacle snaked unexpectedly around him. He felt Bucky grip him with his suckers and twist him around to face him. 

“Loathsome crustacean!” He thundered. “How dare you inflict pain on my soulmate? He is perfect and deserves only good things, while you are lowly and vile! You made him bleed just so that you could hold on to your inconsequential life for a few more breaths! Know this, repugnant beast- you struggle in vain, and nothing but death awaits!”

Tony blinked. Was Bucky really berating the crab for pinching him? 

Apparently he was, if the finger he was waving in admonishment at the crab’s uncomprehending face was anything to go by. 

He burst out laughing. 

“Are you serious right now? Jesus, you  _ are _ ! Are you seriously trying to defend my honor to a crab?” He wheezed. “Oh my god, that's hysterical!”

“Of course I'm being serious. He injured you, therefore he must bear my wrath.”

“He can't understand you!”

“So what, he shouldn't be granted mercy on so flimsy an excuse as ‘can't understand,’” Bucky insisted. “Besides, he will see my anger and know that the only possible sentence is death.”

“I don't know if crabs even have emotions, or if they can see much, so I wouldn't be so sure about that if I were you.”

Bucky glared at the crab. 

“Then I shall have to let the fear of death do my talking for me.”

“You know, he probably would have been dead already if you didn't take the time to lecture it. I could have killed it two or three times by now.”

Bucky huffed, but used his tentacles to turn him back around. 

“Kill him then. And once he is dead and can't hurt you anymore, let me get a look at that finger.”

“You don't need to protect me from  _ crabs _ , right? The worst they can do is pinch me, and yeah, that kinda hurts, but it's not a big deal either.” 

Tony's laughter had mostly subsided, but bubbles of it remained in his chest, as if waiting to escape. It made him feel lighter. 

Bucky just grumbled. Pressed up against Tony's back like he was, it felt like the purring of a well-maintained engine.

He leaned forward over the ridge of rock, hefted the crab to about face height, still in the secure two-handed grip, and brought it down sharply on the ridge. 

The shell parted easily, and the weaker body fell apart into two halves. He crawled forward a bit, still partially wrapped up in Bucky's tentacles, so that he could reach the water lapping against the rock. He dunked the two halves in. From there he pried off the shell and some smiley grey things that he thought might be gills. There was also some orange-brown goop, but the water easily carried that away without him needing to pull it out, leaving him with two perfect halves. 

“If you're not going to cook them in salt water because you are worried that you'll catch ill, why are you cleaning them in that same salt water?” Bucky asked. 

“I assume anything bad will get sanitized when we boil them. I saw some people washing them this way off the back of a Boston whaler, so I think it's okay. Here's to hoping, right?” Tony shrugged. Bucky wrapped his tentacle tighter around him. 

He dumped both cleaned halves in the boiling water on the stove and gestured for Bucky to pass him the next one. 

Bucky shook his head petulantly. 

“Tony, you're bleeding! Let me do this.” He whined. 

“I'm not bleeding anymore,” Tony said, holding up his finger as evidence. The cut had indeed begun to scab over. Bucky didn't look entirely convinced. “Come on, I know how to hold them now, it'll be fine.”

Bucky's face didn't change. 

“And if another one gets me, you can admonish it as much as you like,” he added with a smile. Bucky clearly struggled not to smile back. 

“Here,” he said, gesturing for the crab. “How about you go get that cloth thing that you used to fix me the last time I got a cut?”

Bucky reluctantly handed over the crab, taking pains to show how put-upon he felt. 

“Alright, just don't do anything silly that will get you pinched again while I'm gone.”

Tony made a ‘who, me?’ face and a show of accepting the crab with exaggerated care. Bucky snorted, but dumped the rest of the crabs into the carrier without comment and splashed into the water. 

Tony didn't get pinched again, but he did burn himself on the edge of the pot, which made Bucky throw up his tentacles in frustration when he returned with the cloth. 

Once the crabs were all in the pot, there wasn't much to do but wait for them to cook. 

Tony slouched against Bucky while they sat and waited. Bucky kept a tentacle wrapped around his shoulder, and it felt warm and comforting against the nape of his neck. As he stared into the stove’s flames and let his thoughts wander, he realized that Bucky had called him his soulmate and it hadn't rankled at all. 


	4. Humboldt Squid

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a bit of a headache, and I'm not totally happy with it, but here it is.

The crabs were delicious. 

It had taken a little longer than he’d imagined for them to cook, but Bucky made for an excellent distraction. His well of mermaid science knowledge hadn’t dried up yet, and Tony’s hunger for new science had only grown. 

Once the crabs were cooked and ready to go, Tony abruptly realized he had nothing to pull the crabs out of the water with. With a grimace, he walked over to the sparse trees that grew on the highest ground on the little island and found two sticks of about the right size to use as tongs. Tool in hand, he delicately pulled a half a crab for each of them out of the pot and placed them about halfway between himself and Bucky. 

“Take your pick,” he said.

Bucky shook his head and gestured at the pieces to indicate that Tony should pick first. 

“You cooked, you should get to pick.”

“But this is your first time eating cooked crab,” Tony countered. “Therefore you should pick.”

Bucky sat back on his tentacles, putting himself further from the crabs and making him look stiff-postured and strictly moral. He put his one hand over his heart, as though he were terribly affronted. 

“I could not possibly do such a thing! Do I look like the sort of man who would deny my dining partner the first choice of meat? Does something about my manners suggest me to be inconsiderate? I am insulted!”

He managed to hold the fake-affronted face in the face of Tony’s barely-restrained giggles for about two seconds before cracking. He collapsed in laughter, making Tony laugh even harder. 

“Okay, okay,” Tony choked out as he fought to stop laughing, “I’ll go first.”

He tentatively reached for the one closest to him, but when his finger touched the shell of the claw he jerked back with a hiss. It was  _ hot.  _

His finger turned an angry reddish color almost immediately, and he shook it halfheartedly. 

“Guess we need to wait a little longer,” he said. “Here, I’ll fish the other crabs out too, they can cool down while we eat these ones.”

“Wait, let me see your finger first.”

One of Bucky’s tentacles reached out and cradled the hand Tony had touched the crab with. To his surprise, the smooth softness of the tentacle’s skin felt nice against the burned spot. He pressed the digit into the skin, and Bucky responded by wrapping it more securely around his hand. 

“That impertinent creature manages to remain impertinent even from beyond the grave,” Bucky grumbled. Tony snorted.

Once his hand was no longer smarting, he gently unraveled the tentacle and removed the rest of the crabs from the pot. Fain wisps of steam rose from each half as he pulled them from the hot water, and he was careful not to touch them as he laid them out. That done, he reached for the half he had burned himself on. The shell was still hot to the touch, but it was a more manageable hot now. 

He ripped the smallest claw off, taking a chunk of the body with it, then stopped when he noticed how Bucky was staring at him. 

“Do I have crab guts on my face?” 

Bucky shook his head. 

“No, I’ve just never seen a human eat crabs before. Do you eat them one leg at a time?”

“Well, one leg at a time is easier to hold in one hand, you know? You gotta have at least one hand to crack the shell and get the meat out, so it helps to do smaller chunks.” 

He demonstrated by holding the upper section of the torn-off leg with both hands, opposite index fingers curled around opposite sides of the thin exoskeleton plate. Then, like snapping a too-long stick in two, he pulled both hands down and at an angle, pushing the middle of the leg section upwards until the shell cracked, both on top and on the underside. He could have cracked into two, but then he’d be dividing the meat up too, and he liked pulling out larger chunks. Less of a chance of putting a small, meat-colored piece of shell in his mouth. Instead, he dug his fingernails into the crack and pulled up and out, breaking off a chunk of exoskeleton. He continued methodically breaking off paper-shred sized sections until he had a wide-open cavity full of light peach-colored meat. He grasped the meat chunk’s upper end and pulled it neatly off the thin, white, fan-blade structure it was weakly attached to. It came off cleanly. He stuck it in his mouth and hummed. It was delicious. 

“Oh, so that’s how you eat it!” Bucky said. Two tentacles braced his weight like columns as he leaned forward over the pile of crab halves between them to get a closer look at what Tony’s fingers were doing. 

“The body’s a little different, though. The meat’s all pre-divided into little chunks, but they’re all separated by super thin shells into little cells. Sort of. You see what I mean,” he said, gesturing at the crab half in his other hand. “You’ve gotta open up at least one side of the cells to get the meat out. It’s not attached to anything strong, so if you just press on it with your finger you can slide it right out. It would be a bit easier if I had a toothpick or a meat picker or something, but fingernails work just fine.”

He demonstrated by methodically extricating a chunk of meat from near where the leg had attached to the body. 

“How do  _ you _ usually eat them?” he asked as he popped the meat into his mouth. It was delicious, but subtle enough that he could stick it under his tongue and just enjoy the flavor for a few seconds as his saliva lightly dissolved the outermost bits. 

Bucky held up his half and quickly jammed one of the thinner parts of the shell against his upper teeth. They sank straight through, punching a hole. He held it there for a few seconds, then pulled it away and set it down in the mess of his tentacles. 

“They’re already dead and opened up, so I can’t really model it for you. I punch a hole like this with my teeth so I can spit inside it. First I inject it with a sedative, so it stops moving around and trying to pinch me, then I spit in digestive fluids. It’s circulatory system pumps it through the rest of its body, and it basically digests itself for me. Then I use my suckers to disassemble the shell enough to suck out crab-meat jello.” 

He shrugged with his one unmarred shoulder and one tentacle. “Doesn’t really work when they’re already dead and cut up, though.”

“Huh. Your body makes sedatives?”

And so the conversation moved haphazardly from topic to topic until the crabs were gone and it was late enough that Tony couldn’t really justify staying. When he went to bed that night, though, it felt like he was too light to just lay down and go to sleep. If he didn’t concentrate on the here-and-now, he might just drift up and away into the sky. 

Instead, he turned his mind with renewed purpose to the project he’d been working on in his spare time- the cheap plastic face mask he’d bought not too long ago. 

What was the point of hearing about all this mermaid science, after all, if he didn’t try to recreate it?

* * *

The next morning, the new and improved face mask was ready to go.

Tony had been trying in his spare time to reverse engineer some of the marvels of mermaid science Bucky described, and this was the first success. Or, it would be once he got in the water and used it.

He fastened the heavily-modified mask over his face, inserted the bottom half of the device into his mouth and fastened the top half over his nose, and threw himself into the water.

It took a few heartbeats to convince himself to take a deep breath. Everything in his body insisted that he would just draw water into his mouth and drown himself. He pushed the fear down, and took a deep breath.

Water poured into the device, then back out again as the mechanical “gills” got to work. If Tony concentrated, he could feel the more flexible backside of the device swell and deflate minutely against his tongue. The air that the device pumped into his nose and mouth was a little cold and both smelled and tasted a little like salt, but the important part was that it worked.

He swam around, testing a couple of different angles. It was most comfortable when he was facing downward, but looking forward or to the side seemed to make the mechanical gills work more efficiently. If he moved backwards too quickly, he sometimes got a tiny amount of water along with the air. He’d have to look into that. 

After a few minutes making sure the device would hold up, he set off towards his and Bucky's meeting rock. Bucky would likely be around there somewhere, and he wanted to surprise him. If Tony could stay underwater, perhaps they wouldn’t have to wait for calm, clear nights to go swimming together. He still wasn’t anywhere near as swift in the water as Bucky, but he wasn’t desperate to get a good, deep breath either. If they stayed under the water, the chances of being seen were slim. 

The cool water felt nice on his skin after the heat of the sun, especially on his legs. However, if he swam too far down, the temperature became more unpleasantly cold. He tried to stick to shallower water that had had a chance to warm up a bit in the sun, but every once in a while he had to duck down and swim in the colder bottom layer to avoid some obstacle or other. 

It probably would have taken a little less time to simply wade out to the island, but this way he got to surprise Bucky. The breathing mask was his first attempt to meld human and mermaid technology. That was sure to get Bucky excited. He could just picture the way he would lean way over to get a closer look, relying on his tentacles’ suckers to keep him anchored to the rocky bottom. 

He smiled at the image. Sometimes it was terrifying how quickly Bucky had become a mainstay of his life, but most of the time he was just happy to have him. Living out of a tent, while still preferable to going back to Howard, was stressful. Without Rhodey and Bucky, he was pretty sure he would have started talking to himself by now.

Finally, the darker shape of their rock came into view ahead of him. 

Tony smiled, and put a little more power into his kicks as he powered his way around the beach-facing edge, towards the other side where Bucky always waited for him. Just around the bend, he saw the trailing end of a familiar tentacles pulsing a bright, electric blue. 

“Hey, Bucky!” He called. His voice sounded strange and fuzzy as it traveled through the water. “Look, it worked! I got your strange mermaid tech to play nice with human tech!” He kicked off the ground and shot over to where the merman was clinging to the side of the rock ledge. 

Then he noticed a differently colored tentacle tangled up with Bucky’s. 

He hadn’t noticed the second tentacled mermaid next to his friened until he’d rounded the corner, but now that he had the stranger had his full attention. His human half was smaller and less muscular than Bucky’s, and the water made his pale, scowling face look deathly ill. His blonde hair added to the washed-out look. However, his tentacles were as long and thick as the anacondas Tony had seen in a natural history museum years ago. They were still smaller than Bucky’s, though only by a little. They rippled with obvious strength against Bucky, who clung like a limpet to the rock. The stranger, who was frustratedly trying to pull him off, flashed his tentacles in patterns and colors too fast for Tony to follow, and his humming was high-pitched and insistent. 

Bucky turned and smiled at him. His happy expression quickly morphed into one of awe. 

“Tony, that’s amazing! How are you doing that?” His voice echoed oddly in the water. It was clearer than Tony’s, but still different somehow. 

The other mermaid hissed and his tentacles flashed an angry red, but Bucky ignored him. He started inching towards Tony, pulling the other mermaid along behind him like a parent tugging an incredibly heavy child after them to a doctor’s appointment. 

“I used the science thing you told me about,” he replied. “Um, who is that?”

Bucky looked sheepish. 

“Remember how you were telling me last night that I should really call up Steve and let him know I’m okay, even if he spent the whole call telling me to come back? Well, that was probably good advice, but it’s a little too late now. He tracked me down and now I can’t hang up on him when he tells me to stop being a reckless idiot. Which is rich coming from him, considering all the trouble he regularly gets into.”

The other merman glared at Tony like he’d personally stabbed Bucky in the back with a butcher knife. 

“Which part is the reckless part?” He asked. “Leaving in the middle of the night without telling anyone, or starving yourself?”

“Hey, I’m eating now, aren’t I?” Bucky laughed. “I’ve been good!”

“Yeah, for one day. You gotta keep up with it if you wanna impress me, Ursula.”

“Excuse you, I’ve eaten for  _ two _ days now. I found a little patch of clams just inside the bay this morning, a little bit before Steve showed up.” 

“Wow, good for you, eating for two whole days- Agh!”

The smaller mermaid finally let go of Bucky only to launch himself at Tony. He instinctively shrunk back from the mass of tentacles and fury, managing to frantically kick himself a few feet backwards. The mermaid placed himself firmly between him and Bucky, and bared his teeth. His tentacles flashed quickly and disorientingly. Reds, oranges and whites featured prominently in his display. He hummed angrily in a high-pitched warble that hurt Tony’s ears. 

“Okay,” Tony said slowly, “Wanna translate for me, Bucky?”

Bucky huffed and wrapped two silver-pulsing tentacles around Steve to haul him backwards out of Tony’s space. Steve let himself be pulled, but continued to glare at Tony.

“He’s just pissed because I was right and he was wrong. I told him I would find my soulmate, but he didn’t believe me. ‘It was just a dream, Bucky. You can’t endanger your life based on a dream!’” Bucky laughed. 

Steve hissed violently, and thrust a tentacle outward. It caught Tony in the chest and pushed him roughly away. The backward motion forced several mouthfuls of water through the mask. He coughed, and a little bit of it trickled down his throat. Panicked, he kicked upwards towards the surface. Bucky called after him, but he ignored it. Oxygen was more important. 

He burst into the morning air and immediately ripped the mask off so he could take a breath without inhaling the water. He coughed, trying to clear the baywater from his throat. 

Bucky surfaced next to him, looking frantic. 

“Are you okay? What happened?”

“I’m good, I’m good,” He coughed. “I just got a lot of water inside my mask when he pushed me. I’ll have to fix that. Serious design flaw.”

Bucky reached out with his human hand and pushed Tony’s wet hair back and out of his eyes. 

“How about we take this to the island, huh? We’re kinda exposed out here.”

Tony looked around the mostly-but-not-entirely deserted bay- there was a small group of high schoolers laughing a ways down the beach and a small rowboat coming around the bend and entering the bay- and nodded. 

“Yeah, let’s do that. I’ll stay on the surface, you swim down where no one will see you.”

Bucky smiled like a child asking for sweets. 

“Or I could drag you like I did when we left the bay the other night. You could catch your breath. No one will see me. I’ve been hanging around this bay for a long time and so far you’re the only one to have seen my tentacles.”

“Yeah, which only works because you can stay underwater indefinitely. If you’re on the surface pulling me around, anyone could see.”

Bucky pouted but agreed. “Fine, fine. I’ll see you there.”

* * *

Tony pulled himself up on the island several minutes later, still out of breath from swimming and nursing an ache in his legs. He had to rub them a little before pulling himself up out of the water so they’d cooperate instead of just flopping everywhere like spaghetti. Bucky and his friend were already resting on one of the shallowly submerged rocks, waiting for him. Steve looked annoyed and judgmental, but in Tony’s defense the island was much further away than it had looked and he was not a strong swimmer. If he was slower than two actual mermaids, then that was just how it was.

Bucky smiled at him, completely ignoring Steve’s displeasure. 

“You’re getting better already! That was already faster than the other night.”

Steve looked like he wanted to say something to him, but he had to settle for flashing it to Bucky. Bucky frowned at him and shoved him, nearly dislodging him from his spot on the rock. 

“Don’t look at him, Tony, he’s just sore at me and he’s taking it out on you ‘cause he’s scared I’m going to get into trouble. Still a jerk move on his part, but once he gets to know you he’ll love you too.”

“Why, because I’m your soulmate?” Tony didn’t want to start a second fight while the Steve fight was still going on, so he didn’t let any sarcasm color the word  _ soulmate. _ “I’m pretty sure that only works on you, babe.”

“Yeah, of course he won’t love you as much as I will, but he’s my best friend so he has to like you. He-”

Steve interrupted whatever Bucky was going to say next by shoving a tentacle in front of his face and making it nearly glow with a rapid-fire flurry of orange and yellow flashes. Bucky flashed back with an air of impatience, but when he tried to turn back to Tony one of Steve’s tentacles latched onto his face and forcibly turned it back to face his thundercloud-frown. 

Tony sat there, blinking, as the two flashed back and forth at each other. He definitely needed to learn whatever language they were using, pronto. Funny though, that Bucky conveniently spoke English but Steve did not. He’d wondered about Bucky’s stunning English abilities, back when they’d first met, but he’d gotten distracted and forgotten to ask about it. It suddenly seemed like an enormous oversight. 

Finally, Bucky managed to shut down whatever Steve was flashing and turn back to Tony.

“He’ll come around, once he’s done being an overprotective little punk.” He offered Tony a bright smile. It was completely at odds with Steve’s murderous glare. 

“What exactly does he think he’s protecting you from?” he asked. 

“Oh, you know,” Bucky said casually, even though Tony thought it was pretty apparent that he did not know. “Usual stuff. He thinks I’m going to get eaten by a deep sea creature or caught in a net if I so much as leave the reef complex without telling him.”

“It sounds like you two are close.”

“Yeah, we’ve been friends since we were small enough to fit in your hand. We’ve lived our whole lives side by side.”

“Then how come you can speak English and he can’t?”

“I mean, most people can’t,” Bucky said. He sounded like he would prefer to talk about any other aspect of his and Steve’s relationship. “He does just fine with other languages, though. You should see him talk to those mermaids off the coast of Ireland. But when it comes to human language, I’m just unique like that.” 

“How unique is unique? Are there other mermaids like you out there that speak human languages, and Steve just never bothered?” Tony asked. An ominous picture of what was going on here was starting to form, but he was still missing too many pieces. 

“Well darling, let’s just say me being able to talk to you is another reason why fate clearly put us together. Imagine if I couldn’t talk to my own soulmate!” He laughed. 

Behind him, Steve full-body shuddered. 

It was such a strong reaction to such an innocuous thing that Tony had to wonder if he had missed something. But no matter how he racked his brains or covertly glanced around the rocky ledge of the island, he couldn’t find anything else that could reasonably have caused that reaction. 

Why would Steve by so upset by Bucky’s laugh? It was a pretty nice laugh, in Tony’s very biased opinion, one that made his whole chest heave and his tentacles shake like party streamers in a light breeze. 

Now that he thought about it, Steve didn’t seem to like it when Bucky spoke English, either. 

Bucky, for his part, did not seem to have noticed. He kept smiling and assuring Tony that Steve was actually the greatest thing since popcorn shrimp once he stopped spoiling for a fight. His back was to Steve, and everything about his body language declared that he had all eyes on Tony. He didn’t see the devastation that flowed across Steve’s face, or the terror. 

But Tony did, and it sent ice down his spine.

He was only barely following what Bucky was saying anymore. The urge to interrupt him and ask him what was wrong with Steve welled up inside him, but he couldn’t seem to put words to his vague feeling that there was more going on here than just Steve being upset at Bucky. There was a primal horror in knowing that Steve’s previous anger was just the precursor to this deep anguish, and that that anguish was a direct result of seeing Bucky with Tony, and that Bucky was trying to ignore all of this for reasons unknown.

His heart beat frantically, like he needed to run or fight something off, but all that did was make finding the words to ask Bucky any of his rapidly multiplying questions even harder. He felt trapped in the moment. 

Then Steve moved forward and wrapped one of his tentacles around the one Bucky was gesturing with. Bucky broke off his sentence and turned to face him again. The air between them crackled. 

Slowly, Steve lifted their joined tentacles and flashed his half of the pair dark blue and grey. Tony didn’t know a single word in their mermaid language, but looking at Steve was like looking at a man whose friend had just announced they were going to die of some incurable illness. 

In response to whatever it was he said, Bucky gestured with a lavender tentacle at his upper arm, where Tony’s name was inked onto his skin. 

That kicked off a long, rapid-fire argument that dragged on and on over tense minutes. Instead of trying to watch, Tony sank down onto the rocks and tried to absorb what he’d seen. 

Bucky’s ability to speak English was strange and rare enough among mermaids for him to thing it was ‘fate’ that he could speak it. Steve did not speak it, and while he was angry that Bucky had gone somewhere on his own, he was  _ livid _ that Bucky was speaking in English and  _ devastated  _ when Bucky laughed. Bucky assured him that Steve was a great guy, and if Bucky was telling the truth about the whole soulmate thing then it was unlikely that Steve was jealous, though that could still be it. There was no way to really know if all mermaids put as much stock in this soulmate nonsense as Bucky did. Steve must have some chosen mate of his own, whose name was inked somewhere on his own body. And earlier, when Tony had been underwater with the mask, he’d acted like he thought he needed to scare Tony off, or perhaps just scare him into submission. 

Something was very wrong with all of this, but for the life of him he didn’t know what. 

There was nothing he could really do, though, without more information, and he was unlikely to get more of that until he could learn how to speak to mermaids other than Bucky. And since he was just sitting here like a bump on a log, waiting for them to finish arguing, he might as well get started on it. 

Very slowly, he inched closer to the flashing tentacles. There was a flat bit of rock a little to the side of Bucky’s perch where he could easily see both of them at once. If he’d had his phone with him instead of leaving it with the rest of his stuff at Rhodey’s lab for safe keeping, he’d have taken a video so he could come back and watch this all again later. 

He was constantly distracted, however, by their faces. Especially Steve’s. Steve didn’t look angry anymore, but Tony almost wished he did. Anger was better than that face-twisting, desperate sadness. 

His foot accidentally jostled a small stone, which clattered and rolled a little ways before stopping. 

That small sound was enough to draw the attention of both mermaids.

Steve flashed through every shade of red visible to the human eye. Tony jerked back. 

He immediately knew it was the wrong thing to do. There was no good reason for him to let Steve know he was intimidating, and showing distress of any sort was bound to galvanize Bucky into unwanted action. Besides, Stark men were made of iron. Weakness was better kept hidden. 

Sure enough, Bucky made a face like a kicked puppy as he looked wildly between the two of them, and Tony felt both guilty and irrationally angry. This whole situation was the merman’s fault anyways, so where did he get off looking like that? He was the one who disappeared without telling anyone and then proceeded to ignore all attempts at communication, and he was the one who clung to the idea of Tony-his-soulmate so hard he was starving himself until yesterday. 

Bucky flashed a rapid-fire series of light blues, reds, and warmer golds interspersed with flatter grey spots that moved down each tentacle like bugs. Steve’s tentacles all went white in the same instant, then darkened to a deeper blue. Bucky wrapped a tentacle around Tony’s wrist and hummed aggressively. 

The anger beat more insistently in his chest. He didn’t want to be fought over, and he resented being put in that position. Running away from home had been about wresting control of his life away from Howard. He wanted to work on projects that had nothing to do with  _ helping the company. _ He wanted to escape the constant arguments where he was somehow always the one who had done wrong, even when his father was the one who threw the bottle across the room. 

He wanted to scream at Bucky. 

But Bucky was, soulmate situation notwithstanding, one of the best parts of his Howard-free life. He always listened to Tony talk, was interested in what he did, and never got tired of him. Aside from perhaps Jarvis, he was the only one that the last point could be said of. 

Though maybe he’d grow tired of him too, given time. This soulmate-fascination of his might not last forever. It wasn’t like Tony could reciprocate, after all.

Suddenly, Bucky’s flashing stopped. Steve continued at an even more frenzied pace, but Bucky pulled away from him and crawled up the rocks onto the little island. One of his tentacles wrapped around a rock near where Tony had retreated and he pulled himself up until he was right next to Tony. 

“I’m sorry about this. You were going to show me the new tech you made, but Stevie and I just can’t seem to come to an agreement. I promise, we’ll talk about it tomorrow, okay? I want to help you test it, watch you tinker with it, all that fun stuff. But all this arguing can’t be fun for you. How about you let me deal with Stevie for now, and we’ll meet up again like normal tomorrow?”

Thank Tesla, he was going to escape this endless fight! If he didn’t think it would make everything worse right now, he’d have kissed Bucky on the spot. 

“Sure, sounds great. I’ve got a couple of things I need to shoreside anyway. I haven’t heard any new updates from my dad’s search efforts lately, so I was going to try and plant a false trail somewhere back East to keep him off the scent.”

He sidled over the side of the rock and into the water with a splash. 

“Good luck!” Bucky called. “Let me know if anything comes up that I can help you with!”

“Will do!”

And then he fled towards Rhodey’s lab, leaving the bickering mermaids behind him.

* * *

“Hey Rhodey, do you mind if I test something out with the drone?”

“Sure. What did you have in mind?”

Tony suddenly realized that he didn’t have an answer to that. He couldn’t reveal himself with the truth, and anything even close to the truth would make him sound incredibly suspicious. He took longer than strictly necessary to turn the drone on and fiddled with the settings a bit to buy a few seconds to think. What was something he would theoretically test… oh yeah! A comparative test!

He smiled at Rhodey. 

“I wanna compare the reception this thing gets with the signal from some of the orbiting satellites, then see what happens to it the farther it goes. We know it can go pretty far out, but we didn’t really look at much more than that. I want better data.” 

He said the last part with a ridiculously over-the-top pout. Rhodey stared at him for a second, both of them trying desperately to hold onto their straight faces, then burst out laughing. His laugh was the end for Tony’s already slipping pout, and a second later they were both laughing. 

“Yeah, sure, do what you want,” Rhodey said. “But you know that’s way beyond the scope of this project, right? You don’t have to get all this supplementary data.”

“But I’m curious, Platypus!” He whined. 

Rhodey held up his hands in an I’m-just-saying pose. 

“Okay, man, I’m not saying you shouldn’t! But isn’t this taking time away from your actual projects?”

Oh. Right. He was supposed to be a normal, on-the-young-side independent scientist with work to do and grant applications to write and timed experiments to worry about and research to publish. Not a fifteen-year-old runaway sleeping in a tent in the woods.

“Ah, don’t worry about that. I’m not in the middle of anything important.”

“Are you sure, man? I’m starting to get guilty about keeping you tied up down here. Or I would, if you didn’t make yourself at home the minute you walk through the door.”

Tony forced a smile. 

“Well, I’m currently working on a computer science thing, so you know. I can take my work with me.” He patted his backpack. “It’s not like I need to be putting in extra hours at the lab or anything.”

Rhodey shrugged. 

“If you’re sure it’s alright. So just how far up are you planning on sending it? It’s gotta be able to come back, you know, I’ve gotta present it at some point.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll have the whole test completed by tomorrow morning.”

* * *

When he launched the drone fifteen minutes later, he launched it with a small package clutched in its mechanical gripper claw. The package was a little on the large side- definitely not something he could have hid if Rhodey had been paying attention. Which he wasn’t.

To be fair, there wasn’t much of a reason for him to be paying attention. The drone was good enough for Rhodey’s professor, had incredible range and height capabilities, and was highly modifiable. This was a pretty extraneous test, as far as the parameters of the project went. But since when did Tony Stark ever stick to the basic parameters?

The drone climbed quickly into the sky. He made a show of noting down the signal strength data as it went, but the real show was over. Even if Rhodey looked now he wouldn’t be able to make out the drone’s extra cargo. 

He headed back into the lab to hang out with Rhodey, already contemplating whether or not he should break out the good coffee and try and make it over a fire tonight.

* * *

When he returned to the campsite, though, he was welcomed by bright beams of light sweeping through the underbrush like little lighthouses searching for storm-wrecked ships in a forest of tumbling, foaming waves. He jerked to a stop, then backpedaled and fled the way he’d come.

His blood turned to ice as he ran; he didn’t even feel the heat his muscles released as they worked. There were two possible reasons for police to show up at his little campsite. Either they were investigating some unrelated crime, or they were looking for him. He was betting on the later. Sure, the possibility existed that there had been a murder nearby in the past couple of hours and they were looking for evidence or suspects. It was possible. But how likely was it?

Not likely at all. 

Fear of exactly this had kept him from pitching a permanent tent, though he had started making his campsite a little more lived-in. Some gathered wood for a fire, a prepared fire pit spot, a spot he kept as clean as possible to put his stuff while he was setting up the tent. It was obvious that someone had been camping there. 

Had he been recognized? It could have been anyone, really. The shopkeeper he’d bought the mask from. A bagger at the grocery store. A passing beach goer. There was nothing strange about his interactions with those people, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t seen his wanted poster later and put two and two together. 

A sudden thought hit him. Could it have been Rhodey? Rhodey had definitely been in more contact with him than anyone else, and therefore would have had the most chance of recognizing him if he ever saw his picture on the news. Rhodey had been asking about his projects earlier- could that have been him trying to catch Tony out in a lie? How difficult would it have been to find out that he wasn’t, in fact, a graduate of the University of Southern California, that he had never even properly gone to college, that he wasn’t nearly as old as he was pretending to be? Rhodey would have had an incentive to do the research, too. Tony was his actual, professional scientist project partner, wasn’t he?

He shoved the thought aside to deal with later. It wasn’t necessarily Rhodey.

The only upside was that he hadn’t lost anything but the wood. 

His breath was coming short by the time he reached the beach. It was dark out, and the waters looked like someone had spilled soy sauce all over the rapidly dimming horizon, but he hefted his backpack up as far as he could and waded in anyway. 

Bucky was there to greet him when he reached the little island. His tentacles flashed white when he saw Tony, then glowed a soft purple. 

“Tony! You’re never here this late. Did something happen? Are you okay?”

A purple tentacle reached out and snagged his backpack. It withdrew to higher, dryer rocks and settled it on a flattish one. 

Tony hauled himself up onto the rocks and half-collapsed, half-threw himself into Bucky’s tentacles. Two of them wrapped around him comfortingly, warm and slightly wet against his sweaty back. They pulled him closer, but didn’t tense or hold him too tightly. If he wanted to, it would be easy to escape this hold. Gratitude bloomed so intensely in his chest he nearly sobbed. 

“Somebody told on me. It could have been anybody, I don’t know, but when I went to pitch my tent there were policemen with flashlights all over the place.”

A third tentacle began to stroke up and down his mid to lower back. Fissions of warmth and cold followed in its wake, and the icy cold terror he’d been feeling began to dissipate. 

“I was too cocky. I knew they weren’t following that lead about me going north anymore, but I still thought I didn’t have to worry about them finding me all the way over here. I got too comfortable, I didn’t remember that every stranger I passed could turn me in, and now they’ve found me. I don’t want to go back, Bucky. It took long enough to get up the courage to leave. It’ll be harder the second time.”

Bucky’s tentacles rippled along his arms and back soothingly. 

“Did the police actually see you?”

Tony frowned. 

“No, I don’t think so. I ran as soon as I saw what was going on.”

“Then they haven’t found you yet,” Bucky said determinedly. “They got close, but almost catching a fish doesn’t fill your belly.”

Tony wanted to say  _ I need to get out of here, _ but he didn’t dare make Bucky think he might be leaving him. He didn’t want the soothing tentacle-strokes to stop, and he didn’t want to anger Bucky. 

(It wasn’t that he really believed he would hurt him anymore. Bucky would try persuasion, persistence and pursuit before he turned to crimes of passion. That didn’t mean Tony wanted to anger him any more than he had wanted to when he first met him.)

“You can pitch your tent here, for now,” Bucky continued. “No one comes here, so you probably won’t be spotted, and it’s hard to sneak up on. People splash a lot when they walk through water. That’ll buy you a little time to figure out where we should go.”

_ We. _ Of course. Bucky would be happy to flee with him. He had no emotional attachments to this place. He had no Rhodey or days spent sitting coding on the beach or pleasant walks to the grocery store or memories of how clean the woods smelled in the morning.

That was uncharitable, though. Here the guy was, trying to help Tony out, and he was brooding on Bucky’s obsession with him. Way to be mature, Stark. 

He heard the sound of a zipper being pulled, and looked up over Bucky’s shoulder. Long purple tentacles had opened his backpack, and were pulling out his folded up tent and the bag of tent spikes. Bucky wasn’t looking at them, but the tentacles glided over everything curiously, feeling it’s shape and playing with it to try and figure out its purpose. Tony was abruptly reminded of the book on octopuses he’d been working his way though piecemeal style in the library. It had said that octopus tentacles may be semi-autonomous, capable of making some decisions and solving some problems themselves, independent of any one neural center. 

He made to get up, but Bucky hugged him harder. Still not a hard embrace to break, but enough to make it clear he wanted him to stay where he was. 

“Hey, let me do it. It seems simple enough, and besides, you ran all the way here. You should get to rest.”

For the first time Tony felt the ache in his legs. He didn’t run much, though that was mostly because he spent more time doing science than athletics. He could, he just didn’t. 

One of Bucky’s tentacles stroked his calf, and it felt much nicer than it should have. 

As he watched, four tentacles twirled the stakes around pulled and re-folded the tent, and slowly figured out how the whole mess fit together. There wasn’t a whole lot of soil deep enough to dig the stakes into, but Bucky just wedged two of them into little crevices between the rocks that lifted the far side of the island well enough out of the water that the plants that grew higher up could flourish without fear of salt water. The tent got a little tangled, and at one point Bucky ended up turning around to look at it properly, but eventually it was set up and ready for use. 

He giggled a little into Bucky’s shoulder, and Bucky beamed at him in return. 

“There we go, there’s the face I like to see,” he said. 

This time when Tony rose, the tentacles slid off him easily. It felt strangely like a loss, and he almost bent down and picked one up to hold in his hand like a bark-stripped, smooth-under-the-fingers stick. Instead, he walked over to his backpack and untied his sleeping back bundle from the straps that held it in place and unrolled it inside the tent. Once it was set up, he grabbed his backpack and pulled it inside after him. 

When he went to close the tent zipper, he paused. Bucky was still there, perched on the rocks a few steps away, watching Tony intently. His eyes lingered especially on the space next to Tony’s sleeping bag, which was just about big enough to fit a small person. 

Or perhaps half a big person.

“I don’t think your tentacles will fit, but if you want to come inside you can,” he said, before he could remember all the reasons he didn’t want to invite Bucky into his sleeping quarters. He was jittery with fear, fight-or-flight response delayed, not really dealt with, and Bucky was the only person he could really trust to not have been the one to report him to the authorities. He shouldn’t soften up any boundaries he had set with Bucky, but right now he  _ really  _ wanted to. 

And what was the point of running away, really, if he didn’t get to do what he wanted to do?

Bucky looked ecstatic, and immediately pulled himself up the last few feet of rock and into the tent. He had been out of the water long enough while he was comforting Tony that the human-like part of him had dried out, but his hair and tentacles were still wet. The hair part was fine, but the tentacles would soak his sleeping bag, and he didn’t want to put it away wet. 

He prepared to tell Bucky just that, but he needn’t have worried. Once his chest was inside and nestled against Tony’s crossed legs, he settled down with an air of finality. His tentacles draped down over the rocks and trailed into the water like long kelp streamers. 

Tony went to get into his sleeping bag, then abruptly remembered that he hadn’t changed into his pajamas yet. After a moment of hesitation he wiggled into the bag anyway. He might want Bucky in his tent, but he didn’t really want to change in front of him. Once he was inside, he zipped the zipper all the way up, putting a solid wall of cloth and plastic between him and the merman. Bucky didn’t make any objections. 

“Hey,” he asked as Bucky began wrapping his sleeping bag in tentacles, “Where did Steve go?”

“He’s around here somewhere. He wanted me to take shelter for the night outside the bay, but I told him I had to stay here. And it’s a good thing I did!”

Tony wanted to pursue that thought further, but a combination of Bucky’s warm, inviting body, the nighttime darkness, and the drop that came with his body finally working through the adrenaline was making his thoughts fuzzy and indistinct. 

As he drifted off to sleep, the sounds of the ocean lightly lapping against the rocks of their little island mixed with his and Bucky’s breathing, and when he finally slipped into dreamland, he was more relaxed than he’d ever felt at his old campsite. 

* * *

He awoke to warmth.

His hand reached on instinct to silence the light birdsong alarm on his phone before it could alert anyone else, then fell back to his side. 

In his half-consciousness, he didn’t immediately remember going to sleep with Bucky the night before, if only because he wasn’t really awake enough to remember much of anything. He knew that he was warm, far warmer than he ever was in his tent, even after spending all night with his sleeping bag pulled up over his head. He had actually worked up a bit of a sweat overnight, and it made his arms slide stickily over the smooth arms that engulfed him. His spine ached distantly, notifying him that he had fallen asleep at a strange angle that left his head and one shoulder significantly higher than the rest of his body, but it wasn’t urgent enough to do anything about just yet. 

Slowly, the minute fluttering of suckers and sensitive skin, which had gone unnoticed to him when fully asleep, drew him piece by piece into the world of the waking. 

At last he freed a hand to rub his eyes open and looked around the tent. 

Five of Bucky’s tentacles were wrapped loosely around him, and his face felt slightly squashed from where it had been pressed into his chest. When he got his feet under him and pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, the tentacles slipped off like silk scarves and lay in semi-coiled heaps on the bottom of the tent. 

The thickest of them made a soft thud when it hit the ground, and Bucky stirred. 

Tony froze, waiting for him to settle. It was still far to early for any sane person to be awake, and he fully intended to return to dreamland just as soon as he was done planting his Canadian false trail. 

Bucky mumbled and bit, and turned onto his armless side like he was trying to follow Tony’s residual body heat. 

“Where are you going, soulmate?” he muttered sleepily. His words were formed more by muscle memory than conscious thought, and the parts of Tony’s mind that didn’t immediately recoil thought that the merman wasn’t even properly conscious, and wouldn’t remember this in the morning. 

“I’ll be right back,” he said softly, as though the less voice he gave the words, the less opportunity there would be for his sudden bad mood to leak out. 

“Okay,” Bucky sighed, and slipped back into sleep. 

Tony stood stone still for another minute, rooted to the spot by the twin fears of processing the emotions Bucky’s words had stirred up and of inadvertently waking him up for real this time and having to pretend that nothing was wrong. 

_ Where are you going, soulmate? _

When he was sure that he was the only one awake, he got back to business. The shocking fear and anger and melancholy gathering steam in his chest he shoved firmly into a box labelled ‘inconvenient soulmate feelings’ and pushed it away. 

It was a good thing Bucky hadn’t been clinging to him like a teddy bear, or extricating himself could have been trickier. He wondered idly how long it would take sucker marks to fade as he felt around for his backpack, where he’d stashed his computer. 

It was still dark when he stepped outside the tent. The only hint that morning was coming was the slightest brightening of the horizon. The only lights came from some of the boats buoyed in the more protected corners of the bay and from the occasional car passing close to the beach. In the darkness, the gentle lapping of the water against the island’s rocks seemed much louder and more insistent. 

He chose a fallen log a little ways away from the tent, on the highest part of the island where the dozen or so little trees and scraggly bushes grouped together out of reach of the salt water. Once he was sure the light from his laptop screen wouldn’t wake Bucky, he opened up the software he was using to track and control the drone and checked in on its progress. 

It had reached Maine several hours ago, and had been following a semi-random flight pattern since then that kept it from heading too far south or west. It wasn’t quite where he wanted it to be- his father would never believe he was in Quebec, he’d purposefully failed his French classes in some pre-teen rebellion or other. He spoke it just fine, of course, but he’d made such a big deal of it that Howard would clock anything in that territory as a false lead. 

He typed in the override and began to give the drone directions manually. Time to get to work. 

The rapid-fire clicking of computer keys rang out over the sound of the waves crashing and birds rustling in the grass above the beach. Tony’s heart pounded harder and harder until it was beating in time with his desperately moving fingers. It was still dark out, but the horizon was starting to glow and Rhodey would wake up eventually. The drone was fast, but it still took time to fly it from one place to another. He knew Rhodey wouldn’t get upset that he was using it, but he might ask him what he was doing with it, and he didn’t really want to lie to his friend At least, not more than he had too. 

On the other side of the country, the drone flew silently through the forests of northern Canada. Grasped in a crude mechanical claw Tony had rigged to the bottom was a sweater with his name written on the washing label in sharpie, a hastily-written ‘diary entry’ about how much he hated his father and loved the natural wonders of Canada in equal measures. 

Tony pounded out a command, and the drone dropped the sweater on a mossy rock. After a few minutes of random circling, he released the fake diary entry. He imagined the cute ‘beep beep’ noise the drone made when it successfully completed its task, then called it back and shut his laptop. 

Now he was left with the question of what to do with himself while it returned across the entire continental United States. He had a couple of hours to kill, but he had to be ready when it arrived so he could bring it back to the lab. He’d told Rhodey he’d be done by this morning, after all. 

He could always snuggle back into bed with Bucky, he supposed. It was still too early for the summer sun to be more than a smidgen above the horizon. Sleep would do him good, if only by making the time pass faster. 

Unfortunately, while last night had been great, hearing Bucky call him ‘soulmate’ had sort of tarnished the whole thing for him. Where before Bucky’s tentacles felt like a warm, safe, scientifically-stimulating hug, now just feeling the ghost of those same tentacles on his skin made him shudder. He knew Bucky didn’t mean it that way. But it was an abrupt reminder that he wasn’t really Tony-who-Bucky-liked, but Bucky’s-Soulmate. In Bucky’s eyes, he was like an idea, which was perilously close to a  _ thing, _ and it made his skin crawl. 

This whole soulmate thing was messing with his head. Every time he felt like something good was growing between the two of them, like Bucky was someone safe and friendly and responsive in ways few other people in his life had ever been, doubt crept in. Tony didn’t have any sort of soulmate mark or promise of happily ever after that Bucky seemed to take for granted. What would Bucky do, he wondered, when he finally realized that Tony-the-person, or worse yet, Tony-the-screw-up, came right along with Tony-his-soulmate?

And why was it that just hearing the word upset him so much? He thought he’d been getting closer to, well, not being okay with it, exactly, but at least not descending into a foul mood every time Bucky talked about how they were fated to fall in love and live happily ever after together no matter what. He’d been okay the other day, when they were eating crabs together. So why was it suddenly such a big deal now?

The part that made his stomach twist like a wrung out rag, however, was how much he wanted to go back to the tent and snuggle with those tentacles while he could. Sure, Bucky might ditch him down the line, but that wasn’t going to happen for a while yet. 

The sad truth was that he wanted to keep Bucky’s attention and affection, even if it wasn’t for  _ him, _ really. He wanted to keep talking with Bucky about science, wanted to see him everyday, wanted to swim with him and eat with him and  _ spend with him. _ He wanted to go back to the tent and snuggle with him until the drone returned. 

How pathetic was that?

What did it really matter, though, if he  _ did _ just take advantage of that mistaken adoration while it lasted? It would be a while before Bucky wised up, and Tony wasn’t desperate enough to push him away himself, so why shouldn’t he just go back to the tent, snuggle up and enjoy it while he had it?

* * *

The tent material rustled lightly as he stepped back into the tent. Bucky stirred at the sound. His tentacles twisted as he flipped himself around to face Tony.

“Hey,” he said. “How’d you sleep?”

Bucky smiled, big and lazy. “Mmm, much better when you were here with me. Snuggling you is just so much more satisfying than snuggling air.”

“Is that all I am?” Tony gasped in mock umbrage. “A glorified teddy bear to occupy your limbs while you sleep?”

“Mhmm. And a cute body to look at, and a captive audience, and a soulmate, and-”

“Okay, okay, I get it. No need to get mushy.” As though Bucky wasn’t mushy every second of every day. 

Bucky laughed. It was a very nice, completely non-horrifying laugh. 

“Come back to bed? I need to make up for all the missed cuddling.”

“If you  _ insist, _ ” Tony chuckled. The chuckled turned into a small shriek when Bucky’s tentacles shot out and wrapped around him. Suckers latched on to his arms and legs, and thick, powerful muscles tensed around him. None of them squeezed very hard, but they were  _ solid _ in a way that was unexpected for limbs with such delicate-seeming, sensitive skin. The tentacles around his legs rose, taking his thighs with them, and before he knew it Bucky was holding him up in the air in an eight-limbed hold. 

“I do insist,” Bucky said. “Come here.”

He pulled back his tentacles and carried Tony towards him, then deposited him on top of his chest. The tentacles adjusted so that they lay on top of him like weights, holding him gently against Bucky. 

“Those are much stronger than they look, why do I keep forgetting that?” Tony muttered. “Do you mind if I touch them? The more I see them, the more they remind me of snakes, I swear. Not that the shape is too terribly similar, but they’re just so strong and they move so differently from an arm like mine. I see them bend and I think they should be easy to straighten out, but I bet if I tried I’d have to put some back into it.”

“Go ahead.” Suckers on his back and shoulders pulled, spinning him around so his back was to Bucky and the tentacles holding him in place were easily accessible. “Don’t be surprised if I end up touching you right back, though. You’re always out of reach, up on land.” The trailing end of one tentacle wrapped around his left wrist like a bracelet. 

“Not much longer, though,” Tony grimaced. “I probably can’t go back to my old campsite, and this little rock of an island won’t work for long. It’s too exposed. What if someone kayaked by the far side and saw my tent? I’ve gotta come up with a better plan.”

Bucky hummed. “I’ll follow you wherever you go.”

There was that nearly-disturbing devotion, good to see that again. 

“I don’t know where I’d go, though,” he said. “If they know I was here, they’ll look in neighboring towns too. I’d have to go far away from here, but I don’t want to go back to the East Coast. I’d get caught even faster there, or end up in a godforsaken swamp or something. But if I don’t stay by the ocean, you won’t be able to come with me.”

The tentacles around him tensed. 

“I don’t  _ want _ to leave you behind, I’m just trying to figure out where I can go where I can live out of a tent without getting caught. I just feel like I’m running out of places to run, but I’ve got to run somewhere.”

“You could come with me.”

Bucky’s voice was overly casual, but the excitement and hope was clearly trying to escape. 

“What?” Tony awkwardly turned himself around so he was facing Bucky again. “Where you serious last night? About running away to Atlantis with you or whatever?”

Of course Bucky had been serious. He’d known that last night. But if he was suggesting it again, in the light of day, then he must really want it. Tony had known it must be hard for him to stay on the surface all the time, but Bucky had made it clear he wasn’t willing to be separated from Tony. 

There was an excellent chance he would be even more vulnerable if he went with Bucky. He didn’t know anything about any mermaids that weren’t Bucky or Steve, and he didn’t know the language, or how any sort of society might work. He wouldn’t have any friends outside of Bucky, and he would be underwater, which put him at a physical disadvantage. Living out of his tent was inconvenient and difficult and often terrifying, but would following Bucky be any less inconvenient or difficult or terrifying? And if he was honest with himself, Bucky was still a little bit scary. He might treat Tony gently, but the teeth and the over-the-top devotion were still equally unsettling. 

On the other hand, it was also probably his best shot at escaping Howard for good. Bucky was right about one thing- no one would ever track him to the bottom of the ocean. 

And there was mermaid tech down there that he could see with his own eyes, rather than just listening to Bucky describe it. 

“Well, your mask worked right up until Stevie pushed you, right?” Bucky interrupted his frantic thoughts. “So breathing under water won’t be a problem for you! No one will ever look for you under the sea, because everyone knows human can’t survive under water. It’s perfect!”

“There are so many reasons why that’s a terrible idea,” Tony said, but now that he had started thinking about science, the his cogs in his brain began to turn. 

“Lay them on me. I’m sure we can come up with a solution to all of them. We’re soulmates, there’s no obstacle we can’t overcome.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Forgive me for having a little less faith in  _ fate _ .”

Bucky smiled angelically. “If you don’t have faith in soulmates, then have faith in science.” Dang him, it was like he could read Tony’s thoughts. 

“I’m still not a good swimmer. I feel like that’s a real problem when you’re living underwater.”

“You’ll get better, all you need is practice. And until you get there, I can pull you along like when we went out to the edge of the bay. We don’t have to go fast.”

A soft, warm tentacle wrapped tenderly around his calf. Tony narrowed his eyes.

“You just want an excuse to carry me around, don’t you?” 

“Can you blame me? Who wouldn’t want to have their soulmate in their arms all the time?”

_ Soulmate.  _ The word, combined with the warmth in his voice, made Tony’s insides squirm. The word still got his back up, but that warmth was almost better than the warmth of his body. It made his chest feel like it was glowing. He could count on one hand the number of people who had ever talked about him with that warmth and affection, and hearing it was like sweat rain on drought-dried earth. 

He shoved that aside for some other time and pushed on.

“What about pressure? How far down do you normally live?” 

Bucky wrinkled his nose. “I might live a little too deep to start with, but we can stay somewhere else for a little bit. I’m sure you could get comfortable if you just worked up to it.” He suddenly perked up. “We can stay with Steve! It’ll be perfect, he’s the one that wanted me to come back in the first place, and he has a place closer to the surface. For all that he likes to get on my case, he has his own reckless streak, and let me tell you it’s  _ much _ wider than mine. Before I moved had to move somewhere deeper, he loved trailing boats and playing with funny equipment human scientists put down on the bottom. He won’t have any reason to be angry anymore if I’m not on the surface, and when his anger isn’t getting in the way anymore he’ll see how wonderful you are, and he’ll have to admit that I was right all along.” 

He wanted to ask what Bucky meant by  _ before I moved had to move somewhere deeper, _ but now wasn’t the time to get distracted. He put a pin in the thought to come back to later, when he wasn’t preparing to run from the police.

“Okay, but I can’t wear the mask all the time, and it’s still not perfect. You saw what happened when Steve pushed me. What happens if I get knocked backwards and I can’t get to the surface in time?”

“Do you know why it malfunctioned like that?” Bucky asked.

“Of course, I can’t just not look into something like that. You should know me better than that by now.”

“Do you have any idea how to fix it?” Bucky’s smiled like he would never stop and  _ oh, _ that was a leading question.

“Yeah, I can fix it, but I’ll need some materials.”

“We can always come back to the surface for supply runs,” Bucky said. “It’s no more dangerous than being here all the time.”

Tony grabbed one of the tentacles and stroked over the non-suckered side absentmindedly, like he was petting a cat. Bucky had a good point. He could come up to the surface to get things he couldn’t get in the ocean, but only if he had money to buy them with. He’d have to either be confident that his game apps would keep selling, or keep developing and selling more apps. To do that, he’d need his computer.

“What will I do with my computer, or any of the rest of my stuff?”

“Well figure that out. We can make a waterproof bubble or something. It’ll be an engineering challenge!”

Actually, that sounded like fun. High-stakes fun, with lots of opportunities for it to go horribly wrong, but that just added to the appeal. And if he was living with mermaids, he could use mermaid science to do it!

“Okay, but what about basic human stuff? How will I sleep? What will I eat? I can’t inject digestive juices into my food like you.”

“If you manage to make a place for your stuff, you could sleep there too! And I’ll bring you food, and prepare it for you, and feed it to you. You will never go hungry as long as I can swim.”

Bucky put a tentacle over his heart as he said this, looking simultaneously very solemn and very pleased with himself. 

“I’ll- I’ll think about it,” Tony finally said. He was still unsure, but he didn’t have a whole lot of better options, and he didn’t think he could take another scare like the police search of his campsite. 

Bucky’s face lit up like he’d said  _ yes _ . 


End file.
